An almost impossible problem

This is one of my favorite African pictures because of the intensity of the leopard's expression while the cat was hunting impala. I shot this at sunrise in Kenya, and even though the leopard is shaded, the background was sun-lit and, worse than that, there were golden colored grasses, out of focus, that intruded on the face and body. I cloned those out. That was easy. The seemingly impossible challenge, though, was that in the original, one piece of grass crossed the whiskers. It was golden in color, brightly illuminated, and blurred. Since whiskers, like hair, are impossible to separate from the background so it looks 100% natural (because of the translucent 'transition zone' between the hair or whisker and the background), I really didn't know what to do. I thought about this problem for days. Then it occurred to me to try selecting the problem area using the lasso tool and applying a large feather (30 pixels). Then I desaturated the red and yellow colors in the hue/saturation dialog box. The problematic blade of grass virtually disappeared (golden sunlight consists of red and yellow). I then added a touch of contrast and the result was surprisingly good. My settings were 1/250, f/5.6, and 250 ISO. I used a 500mm lens plus a 1.4x teleconverter, giving me 700mm of focal length.