Her 16-year-old son had just run into the house saying he saw something moving in the yard. “I didn’t wait,” Ferguson told the Associated Press. “I did what any other mother would do to protect her children.”

Grabbing her phone and legally registered firearm, she stepped outside and saw the monkey about sixty feet away. With police and animal control not yet on scene, Ferguson said she made a quick decision to defend her family. “It just stood there at first, and when I fired again, it backed up and went down,” she said. “If it attacked somebody’s kid, and I could have stopped it — that would have been on me.”

According to the National Geographic, rhesus monkeys are intelligent primates that can become highly aggressive when stressed or separated from their group. Officials from the Jasper County Sheriff’s Office later confirmed that one monkey was located and secured Sunday morning, with assistance from the Mississippi