With a circus of media, law enforcement and wildlife experts crowding her back yard Tuesday, Margie Briggs called her West Jordan neighborhood a "zoo" - complete with lion.
No one believed 9-year-old Rebecca Briggs when she said there was a lion under a car near her back yard."She said, `Mom, there's a lion underneath that truck,' " Margie Briggs, 38, recalled. "I said, `Oh, Becky, it's just a big cat.' "
But when she peered under a truck in a neighboring driveway, Briggs saw Blitzen, the family's Hungarian hunting dog, nose-to-nose with a 100-pound mountain lion, also called a cougar.
"They just did a showdown," she said. "It was incredible. For two hours (Blitzen) didn't flinch. All those men were crawling around and he still didn't move. He was just pointing straight at that cat."
The mountain lion was spotted Tuesday at 2385 W. 8481 South about 6:30 a.m., said Randy Gerona, West Jordan animal control officer. It showed up at the Briggs home, 2445 W. 8070 South, about 11 a.m. The Tuesday incident marked the fourth mountain lion recovered in the area during the past 10 years and followed a similar incident in Riverton on Christmas Eve, he said.
"It was just sitting there," Gerona said. "It was really quite cute to see."
Experts from the Division of Wildlife Resources responded to the home and attempted at least twice to drug the lion. When they finally shot it with a tranquilizer gun, the cat lunged at the dog and grasped his head in its mouth and paws, Briggs said.
The lion bolted across two fences and curled up in a window well a block away. The drugged animal was recovered and later released in the west Oquirrh Mountains.
"It was marked just like a lion you would go to the zoo and see," Briggs said. Two hours later, Blitzen was curled under the family's living room Christmas tree, with minor bite and claw marks around his head.
Briggs said she was never really scared and likely didn't realize the danger of the situation until she saw it grab the dog.
"The only time I started thinking `oh my gosh' was after he took a swipe at the dog," she said.
Authorities say the two recent sightings are not unusual but have come early in the season.
"It's similar to a teenager that gets kicked out of their home," said Boyde Blackwell, DWR mammal coordinator. "They're all mixed up. They've just only started to learn how to kill and their mother kicks them out."
Blackwell attributed the West Jordan and Riverton sightings to low deer herds and the lions' following the deer to lower elevations.
"We usually have two or three of these every year," he said.