Nevada Backroaders

Please remember that those cute animals we encounter in the back country are still wild animals and can be dangerous

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Mountain Goat Gores Hiker to Death in WashingtonUpdated: 2 hours 39 minutes ago

Dana Chivvis
Contributor

AOL News Surge Desk (Oct. 18) -- A notoriously aggressive mountain goat attacked and killed a hiker in Washington's Olympic National Park.

Robert Boardman was picnicking Saturday at an overlook with his wife, Susan Chadd, and a friend, Pat Willits, when the goat appeared, according to the Peninsula Daily News. Boardman, 63, told his companions to move back down the trail while he tried to scare off the animal.

Instead, the goat charged Boardman, goring him in the leg with one of its horns. When Chadd and Willits heard him yell, they returned to the scene to find the goat guarding his body.

"The mountain goat was terribly aggressive," Jessica Baccus, an acquaintance of Boardman's who was also hiking the trail at the time, told The Seattle Times. "It wouldn't move. It stared us down."

Her husband, Bill Baccus, is a scientist at the park and immediately radioed for help. Three people then spread out across the slope and tried to shoo the animal away by yelling and throwing rocks at it. After about 15 minutes, it finally retreated. But by then, Boardman had been lying there for approximately an hour and no longer had a pulse.

Jessica Baccus began administering CPR, and 20 minutes later a Coast Guard helicopter airlifted Boardman out of the park and took him to the Olympic Medical Center in Port Angeles, where he was pronounced dead.

Park rangers later shot and killed the goat, and a necropsy will be performed on the animal's body to test for disease.

Rangers have been tracking about eight of the 300 mountain goats that live in the park -- including this one -- because they had been acting aggressively toward hikers lately, either by not moving out of the way when people approached or by following them.

In an attempt to condition the goats to stay away from humans, rangers have shot bean bags and non-lethal firecrackers at them in the past, The Seattle Times notes.

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1994 jeep yj wrangler-"d.d." []lllllll[]
Retired Trail Boss and Website Director
Founder of Uncle Brad's Misguided Children
NVBROFC
Re-located from my beloved Mojave to Texas. Where did all the mountains go???

A vast majority of people - especially those who don't live in rural areas - tend to have forgotten that wild animals are that - wild - an not cute Disney animals for our amusement.

Though I don't advocate killing an animal except for food or self defence, I'm glad I live in Nevada; where in most cases you can do your best to protect yourself if an animal attacks you. In other states, protect yourself from a critter attacking you and you get locked up in jail. Thanks to twisted lawyers and Environmental Inc., predators of the two legged and four legged variety have more "rights" than Joe Public ...

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D.A. Wright
~When You Live in Nevada, "just down the road" is anywhere in the line of sight within the curvature of the earth.