{"id":2453026,"date":"2020-01-08T22:15:00","date_gmt":"2020-01-09T05:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=318894"},"modified":"2020-01-08T22:15:00","modified_gmt":"2020-01-09T05:15:00","slug":"lion-through-its-teeth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/lion-through-its-teeth\/","title":{"rendered":"Lion through its teeth"},"content":{"rendered":"
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My good friend and neighbor called me the other day to let me know a lion had attacked its prey right behind her house.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was screaming in terror and crying,\u201d she said. She hadn\u2019t slept a wink that night she was so badly shaken.<\/p>\n

Her husband had fallen asleep on the couch and was startled awake by the noise. He got up to see what all the commotion was about and witnessed the whole thing. For a split second, he thought maybe it was their dog who was being attacked. He ran upstairs and, to his immense relief, found his wife and their dog asleep and safe.<\/p>\n

The next morning, they investigated and found the trail of blood that lead down the hill, about 10 feet from our driveway. The located the deer carcass in the gully that boarders our property.<\/p>\n

The email chain between all the neighbors that ensued seemed to be divided into two camps. On one side were those who were concerned that the cats are getting way too close for comfort. This was the second kill that\u2019s happened literally in the middle of a neighbor\u2019s driveway in the past few months. They worry that the animal is getting too comfortable around the human inhabitants who have taken up residence in its territory. They want to alert the authorities and let them know we\u2019ve had lion activity in the area, very close to our homes. They hoped the lion could be safely relocated.<\/p>\n

The other camp was opposed to alerting any authorities. They felt strongly that we live in the lion\u2019s territory, not the other way around; that the animal has done nothing wrong and that if we are to call the authorities, the animal will most likely be euthanized.<\/p>\n

Some of the emails took on a sarcastic, almost sardonic tone. \u201cLions need to eat, too,\u201d one neighbor wrote. \u201cHere, kitty, kitty,\u201d said another, though I think mostly to lighten the mood.<\/p>\n

Others were panicked, riddled with fear. \u201cI\u2019m not going to let my wife go for walks alone or sit in the jacuzzi at night anymore,\u201d one wrote. A few expressed concerns for the safety of our dogs and small children in the neighborhood.<\/p>\n

Another neighbor put it like this. \u201cThe lions have always been here. Just because we\u2019ve seen one doesn\u2019t mean anything has changed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Me, I\u2019d rather pretend the lion isn\u2019t there. True, it\u2019s always been there, and just because someone saw it viciously murder Bambi two feet from their house doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s going to come after us, right? I mean, there are plenty of big, defenseless, tasty deer around. The house just happened to be in the path of the lion\u2019s hunt. It hadn\u2019t \u201cmoved in\u201d to our neighborhood as one person suggested, it was tracking an animal and that\u2019s where the animal happened to be.<\/p>\n

Many of my neighbors have lived here for decades, with lions roaming around in their backyards. And even if living alongside these super stealth predators is a little creepy, they kind of like it that way.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong: it\u2019s not like I\u2019m not spooked by all this. Just the other day, I picked up Levi from school, and when we got home, it was dusk. Dusk is prime time for lions. A chunk of ice fell off my tire into the snow and I jumped, startled. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought the gray chunk was a mouse that had run beneath my car because it was definitely being pursued by a lion. I could see it in my mind\u2019s eye, the cat leaping from the hillside and onto my back before I\u2019d even had a chance to see it coming. That\u2019s what they do, you know.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true I\u2019ve seen one of these animals before. One afternoon, a mountain lion traipsed across our driveway once right in front of us, maybe 10 feet away. He slinked along, totally unaffected by our presence. He had a gangster look about him. I could have sworn he gave me the \u201cwhat\u2019s up\u201d head nod. That lion was not even remotely fazed by us. He let us know, with his posture and steady gate, who was in charge. We stood, frozen and stunned as he walked right past us and continued up the mountain. And maybe that\u2019s the point.<\/p>\n

Yes, of course it scares me to see a trail of blood with giant paw prints, a deep groove left in the snow where the lion dragged the large animal into the gully next to my house.<\/p>\n

Yes, of course I\u2019m scared to walk my dogs after the sun goes down. My dogs will be on leashes from now on and I won\u2019t walk them at dusk or in the dark anymore. Yes, I carry a bright light and try to make noise and hope that two dogs (even if they are easy pray and would probably taste delicious) plus myself are too much of a hassle for a lion, what, when they have animals much bigger who would put up less of a fight. Yes, I have gone online and researched what to do if, god forbid, I was confronted by one of these predators. Yes, I worry that a lion could leap onto our property and attack Levi like the child the same age who was attacked by a lion who jumped over a fence in Woody Creek a few years ago. Yes, I know I\u2019m supposed to make myself look bigger by raising my arms or opening my jacket. I\u2019m supposed to talk to the lion in a firm voice. I\u2019m supposed to back away slowly. And I\u2019m supposed to fight back if attacked.<\/p>\n

Yeah, right.<\/p>\n

At the end of the day, my feeling is the lion was here first. We chose to live here, in this wild place for the very reason that it is still so wild.<\/p>\n

The Princess misses the beach. Email your love to alisonmargo@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My good friend and neighbor called me the other day to let me know a lion had attacked its prey right behind her house. \u201cIt was screaming in terror and crying,\u201d she said. She hadn\u2019t slept a wink that night she was so badly shaken. Her husband had fallen asleep on the couch and was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2453026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-18 21:54:28","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2453026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2453026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2453026\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2453026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2453026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2453026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}