A donkey in northern California named Poppy is being called a hero after saving a goat from the clutches of a mountain lion.

Art Colyer, owner of Colyer Vet Service in Paradise, Calif., said one morning at about 3 a.m. he heard a scream coming from the barn.
    
When he got outside he saw that his goat Buttermilk was down by the pond being attacked by a mountain lion. Colyer yelled and screamed in an effort to scare the lion off, but to no avail.

"I started yelling and waving my hands and nothing was changing," Coyler said.

"All of the sudden Poppy, the donkey, came running out of the periphery into the spotlight, and she was just braying with just amazing intensity right in the face of this mountain lion," he recalled.

"Her next move was to just start stomping on him," he said. "She started just running around and whooping it up and hitting him with everything she had. It was amazing how she just laid into him."

Buttermilk has almost fully recovered from her run-in with the mountain lion. Poppy only has a small scratch from the incident.
    
Colyer said that the two have been inseparable since the attack.