One early morning in 2018, on a 5-acre property in Elmira, Eric Lee, now 53, went outside to feed his goats in a wooded pasture when he discovered one of them was missing.
Mama, his wife’s favorite goat, was gone. Lee ventured out with his dog thinking Mama may have gotten her horn stuck in a fence. Instead, Lee found Mama buried on the property, 50 yards from his front door. Immediately, he knew it was a cougar.
The cougar, often referred to as a mountain lion, never came back for its food. When Lee and his wife posted about their experience on Facebook, several people living in the area sympathized and expressed their own encounters with cougars, and the lack of response from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife…