Shovel-Wielding Camper Kills Mountain Lion in Colorado

Eli Fournier Oct 9, 2024

*Editor’s note: The man in this article—Andrew Johnson—called MeatEater a week after this story was originally published to clarify several points. The mountain lion attacked his 11-year-old dog, not the other way around, as the CPW press release implied. The “campground” the incident occurred in was an open cow pasture used seasonally by Johnson and his fellow raft guides on the Arkansas River, and Johnson makes clear that the scratches on the mountain lion were likely from previous tussles with cows. Finally, Johnson says he cooperated with the CPW officer the whole time, and that the officer didn’t “find” or “discover” the mountain lion’s body—it was in plain sight, and Johnson was up front about what happened: an unfortunate interaction with his dog.*

Every couple of years, someone in Colorado fights or kills a mountain lion in a strange way. In 2019, a runner choked a lion to death with his bare hands, and in 2022, a man was attacked on his porch in Montezuma County. Now, there’s one more strange encounter to add to the list.

On September 26th, a man killed a mountain lion with a shovel at a campground near Cañon City in south-central Colorado. According to a Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) press release, a game warden arrived at the scene the next morning to find the dead animal on the hood of the man’s jeep (CPW has not released his name, and MeatEater couldn’t get in touch with him for a first-person account of the incident).

The man told the officer that he was sitting in camp with his dog—a husky—the previous night when the lion approached. The dog began barking and growling as the lion got closer, and eventually pounced on the cat when it was about ten feet away. As a fight unfolded, the man grabbed a shovel and whacked the lion on the head, killing it.

The next morning, the officer on the scene decided that the man was acting in self-defense against the unusually aggressive cat—a 95-pound female—and was justified in killing it. The body of the cat also appeared to have injuries to its front right paw and scratches along its back, which could have been from another recent fight. The cat’s body was sent to a state animal health lab for a necropsy.

Remarkably, the man was uninjured in the kerfuffle, which is why CPW says they aren’t counting the incident as a mountain lion attack. The agency claims there have only been 25 qualifying lion attacks on humans since 1990.

While it’s possible that the attack was a one-off incident for this particular cat, mountain lions are known to prey on dogs, when available. In the winter of 2022-23, mountain lions killed or attacked 12 dogs near the small town of Nederland, Colorado. A few years earlier in Cody, Wyoming, a lion attacked a family’s dog in a relatively urban neighborhood. The man grabbed its tail while his wife retrieved a gun and shot the lion. The true number of cat-dog interactions, though, is realistically much more numerous than those that are publicized. For every reported incident, there are likely several others that go unreported.

“Once a lion learns that pets can provide a relatively easy meal, they are more likely to continue pursuing that food source,” Joey Livingston, a CPW public information officer, told Cowboy State Daily last winter. “Deer are wild animals that have thousands of years of behavioral adaptations to help them avoid predation and can be tougher to hunt than domesticated pets,” he continued. So, can you really blame the cats for pursuing an easy meal?

In Colorado especially, it’s possible that the number of human or dog interactions with lions could increase in the next few years. This November, Coloradans will be voting on Proposition 127, which seeks to ban all mountain-lion hunting in the state. For more information on this citizen-initiated ballot measure, check out this article.

On the whole, it’s unfortunate when wildlife dies in unwanted human encounters. But with proper predator management, the risk of mountain lion attacks, in particular, can be reduced. Still, one can’t help but wonder: what’s the next strange attack out of Colorado going to look like? If the last few years are any indication, it probably won’t be long ’til we find out.