A man sitting outside his RV at a Colorado campground killed a mountain lion with a shovel last week, prompting an investigation by wildlife officials.
The man told Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials that the mountain lion approached while parked at a campground west of Cañon City Thursday evening, according to a CPW news release issued Wednesday.
He told officers he had been sitting outside the camper with his husky, which attacked the lion when he walked within 10 feet. The man then grabbed a shovel and struck the mountain lion in the head, killing it.
The man reported the incident to CPW the next day. The responding officer found the mountain lion carcass on the hood of the man’s Jeep. CPW biologists will perform a necropsy on the animal.
It is illegal in Colorado to kill a mountain lion outside regulated hunting or to protect people or livestock from death or injury.
The officer’s preliminary finding was “that the man feared for his life and acted in self-defense when confronted by a lion that was behaving unusually and extremely aggressively,” the news release said. But CPW will continue to investigate the incident.
According to CPW, the mountain lion was a female weighing approximately 95 pounds. He had an injury to his right front leg and scratches on his back.
CPW is not considering the incident a mountain lion attack because the man was never touched by the mountain lion.
Although there are more than 3,800 mountain lions in Colorado, the elusive predators rarely attack humans. CPW has recorded 25 lion attacks on humans in Colorado since 1990.
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