I LAUGHED. AND DID I FEEL GUILTY? I DID NOT.

There is a news story coming up in a minute, but first, some background information.

That, as I hope you had gathered, is a mountain lion (puma concolor). It is eight feet long and weighs 200 pounds. It can climb trees, run 45 miles an hour and jump 18 feet straight up. It can also walk with near total silence and then jump 40 feet forward from a standing position onto its prey (usually deer), whereupon it will do one of two things. The first is to land on the deer’s back, sink its teeth into the back of the deer’s neck, and take advantage of the wedge shape of its teeth to separate the vertebrae and sever the spinal column, killing the deer if it’s lucky. If it’s not lucky, the deer is merely paralyzed and gets to watch itself be eaten alive. The second option is far more rare, but has been documented. When the mountain lion misses on its first jump, it can spin around, grab the deer’s nose in its claws, and yank downward hard enough to snap its neck. Eating follows. In summary: pure badass. It is not to be trifled with.

Next exhibit.

That is a Jack Russell terrier, and it is small and feisty. It was originally bred to chase foxes down holes and drive them out so that they could be shot in the face for fur, but now it’s more commonly a lap dog, though it is one of the smarter and less despicable of the lap dogs (most of them are despicable). It weighs about 15 pounds, and its chief form of attack is to rush, stiff-legged and barking like a thing possessed, towards its target, whose ankles it will then nip with savagery. I can say from personal experience that if you kick it in the face, it will go away. The same is not true of a mountain lion.

Moving on to Exhibit C, we find this:

That is a Shih Tzu. Its name means “lion dog,” and comes from the fact that it has long hair and literally no other resemblance to a lion at all. It is so useless and inbred that if you feed it soft food, you have to wipe its goddamn nose for it or it will get infected and rot. If you let it drink anything other than filtered, bottled water, it will get eye mucus and go blind. If you let it drink out of a bowl or any other flat surface, it will get water in its nose and either contract some kind of fungal infection or just drown. In its own water bowl. Another side effect of that pathetic, smashed little nose is that it can’t breathe if the temperature gets hotter than about 75, and it’ll freeze to death in about 30 seconds in the snow. By contrast, here is my dog in 15-degree weather, with snow on her face, having a grand old time.

The Shih Tzu also gets hip dysplasia despite weighing the same as a gallon of milk, and it’s ranked 70th of 79 on a popular list of dog intelligence. Its entire defense mechanism consists of barking and pointing its eyes in different directions. If you kick it in the face, it will probably just die. It is a despicable and pathetic little waste of flesh.

Also, Shih Tzu owners are the most annoying people in the world, simpering over them more than they do their own children and wearing shirts that say “They sent me a Shih Tzu—the other angels were busy.”

Now, to our story.

On March 4th, a mountain lion chased a family’s tiny dog into their house in an attempt to eat it, or maybe just to shut the fucking thing up. There, it was met by a pack of tiny dogs, namely a Jack Russell and four Shih Tzus. Those dogs decided to fight back. Who would prevail, the street-smart Goliath or the four tiny but brave-hearted Davids? Well duh. The mountain lion killed one of the dogs, the others ran away, and the lion trapped the three human inhabitants of the house in a room until the sheriff could come and tranquilize it. It may have had something to do with the fact that the lion weighed 4 times the combined weight of the dogs and had claws and teeth and stuff. I like to imagine it like that scene in Indiana Jones when the big dude is twirling the sword around and Indy just shoots him.

Chalk one up for Nature.