Two horses injured in suspected cougar attack near Raymore, Sask.

Cougar sightings are rare in Saskatchewan, but the big cats are out there, mostly in the south. One rancher is sounding the alarm after he says a cougar attacked two of his horses, nearly killing one. I was in shock, I know that. So I opened the door and I got out and I didn't know what to do or what to say. I'm looking at this and I'm like, oh. What am I going to do here? This is where Lyndon says the attack happened, in a pasture about 130 kilometers north of Regina. It was in the middle of the night on October 23. And the next morning, when Lyndon went to feed his horses, he found them injured and covered in blood. So I immediately phoned the vet. And she come right away. And we cleaned it all up. But as you can see, there's so much hide missing from when the cougar bit it. It's impossible to sew it up. The pair of palominos, named Merrill and Haggard, are expected to survive. Merrill was the most critically injured, with this gaping wound. Lyndon has had many people from the community come to support him. One man even brought his hunting dogs to try tracking the predator to no avail. The conservation officers that inspected the animals believe it was not, in fact, a cougar that attacked, but rather, contact with an object. But a veterinarian who used to identify predation says it's a textbook cougar attack. Luckily for this horse, you know, it was probably millimeters to centimeters away from hitting the jugular vein and the carotid artery, in which case that horse would have bled out, you know, within seconds to minutes. Though the wound can't be sewn shut, Lyndon hopes to heal Merrill enough to have a good life. As for cougar protection, he plans to get a second dog to stand guard. Alex Kozlowski, CBC News, near Raymoor.