A Tofino woman's video of a cougar getting up close to her and her father while they were in their backyard hot tub is making waves on social media.
getting up close to her and her father while they were in their backyard hot tub is making waves on social media.
“We must have been only a foot away from it,” said Natalee Dennis, recalling the moment she and her dad, Steve, spotted the big cat’s glowing eyes roughly an arms-length away.At first, the pair heard a rustle in the bushes, then Natalee’s pet cat was acting strange — soon after, they discovered it was for good reason.“We were sitting in the hot tub, and actually, my cat was out there … kind of looking into the forest,” Natalee tells CHEK News Sunday.
“My dad said, ‘It must have been the raccoons or something,’ and I said, ‘As long as it’s not a cougar,'” said Natalee in an interview.So she pulled out a phone flashlight before switching to camera mode after spotting the cougar, which startled both her and her dad this past Friday, Jan. 10.“You learn about staying calm if seeing a cougar. That’s what we did, and we then got out, and when we came inside, we watched it for about 20 minutes before it took off completely. It just sat there.
Natalee posted the footage on social media, including TikTok, where she captioned it “face-to-face with a cougar.” It has since surpassed 300,000 views, with more than 35,000 ‘likes’ and 600 comments.And despite the recent wildlife encounter, Natalee says the family is still making use of their hot tub — just not after dusk, for the time being.
“We’re about to just hop in right now,” she laughed, “but it’s daytime. The rule is we’ll go in during the day but not at night right now.”Ethan Morneau is a Digital News Editor at CHEK News and is thrilled to be reporting on beautiful Vancouver Island. Find him writing news stories for CHEKNews.ca or crafting TV reports and live hits that...
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