You have to see this! Utah firefighters get mountain lion out of tree after man makes startling discovery
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AN UNWELCOME VISITOR — A Utah man was in for a surprise when he went to make a phone call outside and noticed an unexpected visitor hanging out in a tree.
The man described what happened in a video shared on Facebook by the West Valley City Fire Department on Feb. 1.
“I was standing out here making a phone call and happened to look up at the tree. As I was talking on the phone I was like, ‘That doesn’t look right,'” Damon Barker explained in the video. “I kept staring at it while I was talking and kind of seeing the tail move, I’m like, ‘That’s a freakin’ mountain lion.'”
He ran inside to get his dad and brother to confirm what he was looking at. Sure enough, it was a mountain lion and right “in the heart” of a West Valley City neighborhood.
“That’s when I started making calls,” Barker said. “We ended up calling non-emergency for West Valley and that’s when the wheels rolled. Pretty crazy.”
“A wild night here in West Valley City — literally,” the fire department said on Facebook.
The department explained that officers assisted as the Division of Wildlife Resources tranquilized the big cat, but the cougar didn’t come down as expected.
“Instead, the sleepy visitor got hung up in the branches of the tree,” the Facebook post stated. “Who do you call when you need a cat out of a tree? Us, of course!”
Firefighters climbed the ladder to get the animal out of the tree. The Facebook video shows firefighters lifting the animal down from the fire engine in an orange tarp. Four men then carry the cat, whose laying on its back with its eyes open, into an enclosure in the bed of a pickup truck.
“Now seeing it down here, that thing is big,” Barker mentioned. “I didn’t expect something that big to be around here.”
The fire department said the Division of Wildlife Resources would “return the visitor back where it belongs — safely out of West Valley City!”