NEW CASTLE — A man walking with his wife on a country road on the Western Slope shot and killed a mountain lion he said was advancing on them.
The incident happened Tuesday, a day after a mountain lion crept through the open doors of a house in the foothills and snatched a Labrador retriever from a bedroom where the homeowners were sleeping.
Wildlife officers trapped and killed that cat Tuesday.
In the Western Slope case, a couple were walking on a road about 2 miles north of New Castle, about 170 miles west of Denver, when a mountain lion emerged from bushes alongside the road.
The two told state wildlife officers that they yelled, waved their arms and backed away slowly, trying to scare the mountain lion away without startling it.
But the couple said the mountain lion was down low and kept moving toward them. The man drew a pistol he was carrying and shot the cat.
“Our investigation shows the mountain lion was about 6 feet away before the man fired a shot,” Colorado Division of Wildlife spokesman Randy Hampton said.
“The couple indicated they felt terrible they even had to do this.
“We felt this was a situation where had they not been armed, we would’ve been dealing with a very different story today,” Hampton said.
The cat in Tuesday’s incident was a young male and underweight at 60 pounds. Hampton said preliminary results from a necropsy — the animal equivalent of an autopsy — show the mountain lion had pneumonia, bronchitis and probably hadn’t eaten in several days.
The location of the faceoff is about 6,500 feet in altitude and wooded, with piñon pine and juniper trees. Hampton said the area is good mountain lion habitat.
Hampton said mountain lions are usually elusive and try to avoid people. He said such encounters are rare.
The last fatal attack by a mountain lion in Colorado was July 1997, when a 10-year-old Denver-area boy running ahead of his family on a trail in Rocky Mountain National Park was jumped by a female cat.
