Mess With The Goat, You Get The Horns: Grizzly Bear Killed By Mountain Goat
Plot twist! You know how the big, bad Canadian grizzly bear typically kills the mountain goat so it can enjoy a nice meal before winter sets in? Yeah, well this time it was the mountain goat doing the killing, according to a report out of Alberta's Rocky Mountain Outlook newspaper.
Parks Canada tells Outlook that the female grizzly was killed after the mountain goat fought back and delivered a fatal blow to the bear's armpits and under the neck. BOOM, dead!
“The necropsy determined that the female grizzly bear died of natural causes, which is due to an unsuccessful predation attempt of a mountain goat,” wildlife ecologist David Laskin told the paper.
“Grizzly bear predation of mountain goats is relatively common, and I guess the mountain goat was successful in this instance and turned the tables on the grizzly. These mountain goats are big animals and those horns are very sharp.”
Keep in mind it was a 70-kilo bear (154 pounds) that messed around and got the horns. We're not talking a 5-star prototypical defensive-end grizzly bear here. According to the Google Search experts, a mountain goat can easily weigh that much, so it appears this was pretty much an even fight, minus the fact that the goat had the stiletto horns.
The park service isn't saying 100% that the goat killed the bear because of bureaucracy and all that stuff, but the wildlife experts who don't have to be hard-ass bureaucrats have given the W to the mountain goat.
“When grizzly bears attack, they tend to focus on the head, back of the neck and the shoulders of the prey, and it’s usually from above, so in turn the defensive response of the mountain goat would be to protect itself using its sharp horns,” Laskin added.