A Canadian woman has used METALLICA‘s music to scare off a cougar while on a walk with her dog last week.
Dee Gallant and her husky Murphy were out for their usual evening stroll on a logging road just outside of Duncan, British Columbia when she said she felt “like something was watching” them.
She told KelownaNow, “I looked over to the right and there it was. I couldn’t make it out at first and thought, ‘Oh, that is a strange color. That’s not a tree.'”
After realizing what it was, Gallant “stopped and looked at him and he didn’t stop,” she recalled while talking to Victoria News. “I looked at him and said, ‘Hey, you, stop it,’ and he stopped. That’s when I started filming.”
Gallant can be heard on the video yelling out instructions to make the cougar go away: “Get out of here,” “Bad kitty,” and “I’ll fight you.”
“It didn’t respond to that either,” Gallant said. “It just stayed locked on to me and seemed really interested, so that is when I decided to stop recording and try to do something else… I quickly rifled through my iTunes and found METALLICA ‘Don’t Tread On Me’,” she explained. “I thought it was the noisiest thing on my phone that would probably scare it. That was also the message I wanted to convey to the cougar… As soon as it started to play, he buggered off into the bush.
“I guess he didn’t want to eat anything that leaves a METALLICA taste in his mouth,” Gallant joked.
She added: “I would love to contact them someday and tell James Hetfield that he saved my life.”
In April, guitarist Kirk Hammett has revealed that he has “a ton of material” written for next METALLICA album in a recent interview with Australia’s Mixdown magazine.
He said: “When I was 13-14 years old, bands put out albums every year. Seriously, KISS put out an album every eight months. None of this eight years between albums.
“None of us are very comfortable with the fact it’s been so long, because that is a long time,” he continued. “We’re hoping to avoid that this time around.
“We’re in our third year since ‘Hardwired’. Maybe we can get a bit more focus and go into the studio a bit sooner. I have a ton of material. I’ve over-compensated, so I’m ready to go anytime.”
Also, METALLICA bassist Robert Trujillo said the band’s next studio album would arrive “a lot sooner than the previous two did:
“This time around, I think we’ll be able to jump on it a lot quicker and jump in the studio and start working. We’ve all vowed to get this one going sooner than later. Now, how soon? I don’t know.
“We’ve been touring non-stop. It’s been over two years now. At some point, sure, we’ll need to take a little bit of a break. It’s sort of the right thing for us to do because we’ve been going so hard.”
METALLICA‘s latest album Hardwired… to Self-Destruct debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, selling 291,000 album-equivalent units in its first week, of which 282,000 were pure album sales. The remaining 9,000 units comprised 34,000 song purchases and 9.3 million streams. It was the third-largest debut of the year in the US on pure sales, behind Drake‘s Views and Beyoncé‘s Lemonade.
The album slipped to number 3 on the Billboard 200 in its second week, selling 75,000 units, including 71,000 copies. Hardwired… to Self-Destruct was the best selling heavy metal album of 2016 in the US and seventh overall, with 516,000 copies sold by the end of December.
