Cougar investigation continues in Lancaster Co.

State officials still can't confirm that a cougar attacked a Lancaster County farmer last Thursday evening.

Blood and other fluid samples have been sent  for analysis to a state police lab and another at East Stroudsburg State University, said Jerry Feaser, press secretary for the Pennsylvania Game Commission.

When the results might be available was difficult to predict, he said.

"There's no scat that's been found. No hair samples have been found. ... No pawprints have been found," Feaser said.

A road-killed deer was put out as bait last week, but no tracks have been left near it, he said.

And no witness has submitted photographs.

The injured farmer, Samuel Fisher of Sadsbury Township, reported a cougar jumped him - while he was tracking another one he'd shot and wounded.

The attacker leapt from a tree onto his back, and clawed at the man's chest, face and arms, when Fisher stabbed it with a pocketknife, prompting it to flee, according to the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal.

The commission had been getting eyewitness reports of three big cats roaming the county together, Feaser said.

Such sightings usually involve other animals mistaken for cougars - from housecats or golden retrievers to bobcats or coyotes - although an escaped pet cougar is a possibility.

Wild cougars - also known as mountain lions, pumas or catamounts - haven't roamed Pennsylvania since the late 1800s, wildlife officials say.

The last confirmed case in Pennsylvania was in the 1960s, after one escaped from a circus or a menagerie, commission spokesman Joe Kosack said last week.

Over the last decade, however, dozens of cougar sightings have been reported in Pennsylvania, South Jersey and Northern Delaware.

In 2003, a man living in Chester County, about 15 miles from Sadsbury Township, shot video in his backyard of what could have been a cougar.

In October 2006, a Berlin Borough, Camden County, man snapped a few pictures of a cougar-like cat in a nearby soccer field. Earlier the same year, three Gloucester County citizens and two police officers reported seeing a cougar on the loose, according to Lt. Joseph Giordano of the Greenwich Township police. A hunter also reported seeing two cougars near Wildwood.

Early this decade, according to reports, video and photographs suggested that at least two cougars were roaming New Castle County.