There are lots of questions but very few answers so far related to the death of a woman on a hiking trail in northern Colorado. Authorities have not confirmed a puma attack.
A woman who was found dead on a hiking trail may have been killed by a mountain lion, state authorities say.
Several hikers were making their way along the Crosier Mountain Trail in northern Colorado at noon on Thursday when they came upon a woman laying on the ground and a puma about 100 yards away from her, according to police.
The hikers made noise and tossed rocks to scare the cat off, then one of them — a medical doctor — checked the woman and found no vital signs.
They notified authorities, who launched a massive search by air and ground, closing down the neighboring trails and bringing search dogs into the effort.
The search teams found and killed two mountain lions, who will be autopsied to determine if either had human remains in their stomachs. If they do not, rangers and police will keep looking, as they say Colorado law requires them to euthanize animals who have killed humans, local news reports said.
Pumas, also known as mountain lions, cougars, catamounts, screamers and many other names, are the widest-ranging cats on Earth, found throughout South America, the west of the US, and southern Canada. Credit: Charles Chen/Pexels
It’s important to note that there are no autopsy reports so far. Police don’t know how the woman died, if she was killed by the puma spotted near her, or if the animal approached after her death.
If an investigation does determine a puma was responsible, it’s crucial to place the incident in context. The last recorded fatal mountain lion attack in Colorado was in 1999, and was not confirmed. The victim, a three-year-old boy named Jaryd Atadero, wandered away from the hiking group he was with and was never seen again.
Search efforts in the following days and weeks didn’t turn up anything, but in 2003 another group of hikers found part of Atadero’s clothing. His partial remains were later found nearby.
Police said Atadero could have been killed by a mountain lion, but there’s no definitive evidence and his cause of death remains a mystery.
Aside from that incident, there have been 11 recorded, non-fatal injuries attributed to pumas in Colorado in the past 45 years despite as many as 5,000 of the wildcats living in the state’s wilderness.
Nationally there is some discrepancy in record-keeping, but most sources agree there have been 29 people killed by mountain lions in the US since 1868. By contrast, more than 45,000 Americans are killed in gun-related incidents per year, about 40,000 Americans are killed in traffic collisions annually, and between 40 and 50 American lives are claimed by dogs per year.
Americans are a thousand times more likely to be killed by lightning than by a puma, according to the US Forestry Service.
Despite their size, pumas are more closely related to house cats and small wild cats. They can meow, but they cannot roar. Credit: Caleb Falkenhagen/Pexels
Cougars are elusive, do not consider humans prey, and the vast majority of the time go out of their way to avoid humans. Most incidents of conflict are triggered by people knowingly or unknowingly threatening puma cubs, or cornering the shy cats.
Despite that, there’s confusion among the general public. Mountain lions are routinely confused with African lions, so some Americans believe they are aggressive and dangerous.
Pumas, known scientifically as puma concolor, are part of the subfamily felidae, not pantherinae, which means they are more closely related to house cats and smaller wildcats than they are to true big cats like lions, tigers, jaguars and leopards.
Pumas can meow and purr, but they cannot roar. Their most distinctive vocalization is the powerful “wildcat scream,” leading to nicknames like screamer.
In the Colorado case, police say they believe the victim was hiking alone. Her name hasn’t been released, likely because authorities need to notify next of kin before making her identity public.
This is a tragedy for the victim and her family, and we don’t wish her fate on anyone. At the same time, we hope cooler heads prevail and this incident does not spark retaliatory killings or misguided attempts to cull the species.
A writer reminds us that feline friendships don’t always come easy, but some of the hardest-won are the most rewarding.
When San Francisco’s KQED, the local public radio affiliate, asked its culture writers to reflect on “one beautiful thing” from 2025, Rae Alexander chose her cat, Kevin.
Kevin is “chaos in cat form,” a feline “sociopath” who doesn’t realize how much damage he does with his claws. The tabby, Alexander writes, is “never not screaming at us for food” and pads around as if he owns the place. (That sounds awfully familiar!)
After bringing Kevin’s heavily pregnant mother in from the cold earlier this year, Alexander adopted Kevin’s mother and his “well-behaved sister,” but was repeatedly rebuffed when she tried to get rid of Kevin himself.
Three potential adopters fell through while Kevin was growing out of his kitten stage, drastically reducing his chances of finding a home.
Then something crazy happened: cat and human came to a mutual understanding and the beginnings of trust led to friendship and love. As with any progress in gaining a cat’s trust, it was not a quick process, but Kevin eventually showed another side — a much softer, appreciative version of himself who enjoys cuddling and expresses love despite his quirks.
“As this fraught year draws to a close, I want Kevin to be a pertinent reminder to us all that the little things bumming us out today might just lead to the things that make us happiest tomorrow,” Alexander wrote. “Start putting all those everyday stresses on the stairs. You never know where that might lead in 2026.”
Apologies for going radio silent over the past week. This past Saturday I sat down to write and my computer was dead. As in completely dead — I couldn’t even trick it into loading BIOS or getting a boot screen.
So I said farewell to a machine that had served me well since 2018, that served as my primary platform for writing, producing music and gaming.
Now I’ve got an absolute beast of a machine centered on one of the new Ryzen chipsets, and it takes quite a bit of restraint not to go into nerdy details. I’m still setting things up, especially the music production workflow.
The important thing is, I’m able to properly sit at a desk and write again, and Buddy can properly supervise me from his desktop perch again, so we are now back!
Buddy the Cat’s talents are innumerable! In this rousing number he slips into the style of Gilbert and Sullivan and uses verse to tell us what a feline should be.
“I am the very model of a feline so crepuscular My visage is so handsome and my meowscles are so muscular! I am a little tiger though the fact may seem improbable My knowledge is near boundless in all matters gastronomical I eat six meals a day in circumstances nominal For serving snacks when I demand, my human is responsible No challenge is impossible, no problem yet insoluble I am the very model of a feline so phenomenal!
I’m schooled in all biology from macro to subcellular A meowster of olfactory for every object smellular My hearing’s extrasensitive in low and higher frequencies I hear the mice a-chatter but the elephants don’t speak to me My style is more Big Punisher than Doctor Dre or Easy E Cuz when it comes to hip hop my tastes all face to easterly I like to shake my booty, I’m funky when I need to be I am the very model of a cat who does it easily!
I rule with iron paws be it jungle or the living room And when I’m finished dining, I am content to sit and groom When it comes to games I am the ultimate competitor Obligatory carnivore, I am a model predator Yet somehow cute and fluffy when I feel the need to be Mostly when I tell my buddy “Wake up, human, and feed me!
I am well-versed in big cats whether tiger or jaguarian And qualities of catnip like a feline rastafarian Intimidating surely, in my home I am the guardian Look dashing in a tux or the kit of a safarian! When it comes to ladies all the gents seek my analysis I designed the Taj Mahal and Cleopatra’s palaces I drink champagne from bottles and sip water from my chalices Then ignite sky with a range of borealises! A champion of Opens like the French, Aussie and Wimbledon My game is too complex for the tastes of canine simpletons
A predator so optimal, impeded by no obstacle When I’m roused to anger you will find me quite unstoppable Stylish with a monacle, calm and rarely volatile I am the very model of a feline so phenomenal!
I am the very model of a feline so phenomenal!
[Chorus of girls]
He is the very model of a feline so phenomenal! Find a better cat? Well that is just impossible! He is the very model of a feline so phenomenal!”
How do you ensure people will heed warnings to steer clear of nuclear waste storage sites thousands of years in the future? One outlandish proposal involves genetically engineering domestic cats to glow in the presence of radiation.
Imagine you’re a person living five thousand years downstream.
Maybe civilization collapsed and restarted, maybe records were lost, or maybe like Etruscan, Harappan and proto-Elamite, the languages we speak today will be long forgotten.
At any rate, if you discover a forceful warning left by your ancestors from the deep past, would you understand it without translation or cultural context?
And if you’re the one tasked with leaving the message, how would you do it?
The message has to be enduring. It must be recorded in a format that will withstand the tests of time, conquest and natural disasters. The message must be comprehensible without cultural context, because we have no idea how language will shift in the future or whether our descendants will enjoy the knowledge that comes with continuity of records.
Lastly, the message must be both compelling and absolute in its meaning, because its content is vitally important: This site contains nuclear waste. Do not under any circumstances excavate or disturb the contents of this facility. It will lead to sickness, suffering and death.
The traditional trefoil warning sign is unlikely to scare anyone off. The new radiation hazard sign, right, seems unambiguous, but so do warnings on Egyptian tombs.
How do you phrase that in a way our naturally curious species will heed the message?
We certainly didn’t heed the warnings on the tombs of King Tut and other pharaohs. For all we know, humans of the future might believe the hidden chambers deep in Yucca mountain or buried 3,000 feet underground are filled with fabulous treasures and wonders beyond imagination.
They might interpret the warnings as superstition, meant to ward off looters, “grave robbers” and anyone else who might be motivated to break in. They might see the care and effort that went into encasing the objects and conclude there must be something very much worth preserving inside.
Or they might be driven by simple curiosity, as so many human endeavors have been.
A tour group visiting the incomplete Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage facility. Credit: Daniel Meyer/Wikimedia Commons
Arguments about how to warn the future are at least as old as the Manhattan Project (1942) and the first nuclear power plants (1954 in the USSR, 1958 in the US), but there weren’t serious efforts to come up with a plan until the 1970s, when scientists, historians and other thinkers began to engage in formal efforts to find a long-lasting solution.
Some of the ideas are boring, some are impractical, and some are absurd, like an idea to create a “garden of spikes” atop nuclear material waste sites, to discourage people from settling in the area or excavating.
Unfortunately, one idea that’s still being kicked around is the concept of the radiation cat, or raycat.
Knowledge and language may be lost to history, signage may be destroyed, physical obstacles may be removed. But one constant that has endured, that has seen empires rise and fall, and has existed long before Stonehenge and the pyramids of Giza, is the human relationship with cats.
They’re now valued as companions, but we still use them as mousers on ships, in heavily populated cities, in ancient structures and on farms and vineyards.
They’re embedded so deep into our cultural psyche that it would not be outlandish to think the archaeologists of the future may conclude the internet was constructed primarily to facilitate the exchange of images of cats.
Even the first high-bandwidth deep space transmission was a video of a cat, so in a very real sense, the dawn of a solar system-wide internet was heralded by an ultra high definition clip of an orange tabby named Taters, beamed back to earth from the exploratory spacecraft Psyche, which was 19 million miles away when it transmitted Taters on Dec. 11, 2023.
Consider also that the basic felid body plan — shared by domestic kitties, tigers, pumas, black-footed cats and the 37 other extant species — has barely changed in 30 million years, because cats are extremely successful at what they do.
In other words, cats aren’t going away, and domestic felines have a place in every human society.
So philosophers Françoise Bastide and Paolo Fabbri conceived of the “living warning” in 1984. The idea is to alter the genetic code of felis catus so that the animals glow or change color in the vicinity of nuclear waste, using minuscule levels of radiation as the trigger.
There are natural precedents for this, including bioluminescence and several species of octopus that radically change colors and patterns on their skin to evade predators.
The second component, once the genetic code has been altered, is the creation of folklore: songs, stories and myths that will endure through time, warning people to keep cats close, treat them well, and run like hell if they change color because it means something terrible, something evil beyond imagination, is nearby.
To ensure the folklore of feline Geiger counters endures, an idea by linguist and semiotician Thomas Sebeok would be incorporated. Although empires and states rise and fall, there’s one organization that has survived for 2,000 years preserving a unified message: the Catholic church.
Sebeok proposed an atomic priesthood, an order that would pass the knowledge down through generations, continually seeding culture with stories and songs of glowing felines.
Spent nuclear fuel rods are stored in on-site pools at the facilities where they were used, but pools are meant only as temporary storage solutions. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
If this stuff sounds wacky, that’s because it is. We won’t figure out a way to ensure a message is received and understood thousands of years in the future without considering some off-the-wall plans.
Of course messing with the genetic code of any animal raises serious ethical questions.
We don’t have the right to play God and tinker with the genetic code of extant species. We don’t fully understand the immediate consequences for the health and happiness of cats, and we know almost nothing about the long-term effects on the species.
I’d also argue that we have a special relationship with cats and dogs, one that exceeds any obligations we may feel toward our primate “cousins” or other non-human animals.
Cats and dogs have been living with humans for a combined 40,000 years. They have been molded by us, they are dependent on us, and all that time in human proximity has led to unique changes.
No animals on this planet can match them when it comes to reading human emotions. Our little buddies pick up on our emotional states before we’re consciously aware of them partly because of their robust sensoriums, and partly because as their caretakers, our business is their business.
A clip of a cat named Taters was the first data burst transmitted to Earth using NASA’s upgraded deep space network. Credit: NASA/JPL
We bear a responsibility to both species and the individual animals. It’s not just the fact that without them, our lives would feel less meaningful. It’s the indisputable fact that without them — without dogs who flushed out prey on yhr hunt and guarded small settlements, without cats who prevented mass starvation by hunting down rodents — we would not be here.
Cats and dogs play a major role in the story of the human race. We are indelibly linked. Their DNA is not ours to tinker with, and they are not tools we can repurpose at our convenience.
Thankfully the US Department of Energy has never endorsed the concept of raycats. While there is a website advocating for a raycat program and small groups around the world dedicated to its propagation, the interest is mostly academic.
The Raycat Solution, which maintains a site dedicated to the idea, has a FAQ which says its supporters are serious about its potential usefulness, but for now most experts see it as a thought experiment and reminder that the problem must be dealt with eventually. At some point NIMBY will have to yield to reality, and wherever the US ends up storing nuclear waste, it’ll need to be secured, sealed and marked.
The goal is for the message to endure at least 10,000 years, at which point scientists say the radiation will be minimal.
That’s assuming that the future holds the collapse and rebuilding of human civilization, or at least a technological backslide in which the majority of our species’ knowledge is lost.
We like to think things will be brighter than that and instead of glowing to warn people of danger, cats of the far future will be where they belong — with their human buddies, exploring new frontiers on starships with plenty of comfortable napping spots.
Header image depicts the Alvin Ward Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant in Georgia, the largest nuclear plant in the US. Image via Wikimedia Commons/NRC
[1] The nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain was initially funded and approved by congress in 2002, then was canceled and de-funded in 2011 after significant pushback from people who live in Nevada, along with their representatives in congress. Plans for the site have changed several times in more than two decades, leaving the US with no central, secure site to store nuclear waste.
Abdul Raheem found peace when he adopted his beloved cat, Bambi. Now he wants other men to know felines are awesome.
There’s something to the idea that people who aren’t fond of felines just haven’t met the right cat.
For me, it was the experience of interacting with a friend’s affable tuxedo — just one, since all my experiences up to that point had been with people who kept an unreasonable number of cats.
For Abdul Raheem, it was adopting a cat named Bambi after he and his wife fostered and fell in love with her.
“She brought me so much just happiness, and she made my mental health better,” Raheem told the Washington Post. “My anxiety was better when I was around her. So I just want to give other people that feeling.”
Raheem and his wife, Shamiyan Hawramani, became regular fosters for a shelter near their home, and Hawramani began filming her husband’s doting interactions with the baby felines.
Raheem with one of his bottle babies. He and his wife have fostered about 200 kittens and cats since the COVID pandemic.
Their friends found the videos amusing, and lots of people online have too. Abdul’s Cats, an Instagram account documenting Raheem caring for fosters, has a large following — including young men, many of whom are thinking about adopting a cat for the first time because Raheem is showing them something that challenges stereotypes.
My favorite anecdote is about Raheem’s enthusiasm for cats spreading to his friends. At first, they got accustomed to the idea of baby cats jumping in their laps and taking curious swipes at controllers on nights when they’d hang out and play video games.
Then they came to the same conclusion Raheem had: hanging out with cats is relaxing. Several of those friends have since adopted their own feline overlords, and Raheem says one friend now has four cats running around his house.
As for stereotypes, I think cat ladies get a bad rep. They’re the ones who do all the hard work of managing colonies, trapping, fostering, volunteering in shelters and placing cats in good homes.
When you think of the sheer volume of work, and the things they’ve accomplished — including a dramatic reduction in euthanized cats thanks to TNR efforts — they are the unsung heroes. They do it because they love cats.
Jordan Poole is one of several NBA players who have professed their love of felines. In the off-season Poole volunteers with his local shelter.
But it’s also good to toss aside labels and outdated attitudes, like the insistence that cats are companions for women only, and that adopting and caring for a feline friend is somehow unmanly.
Like Jordan Poole, the NBA guard who evangelizes the awesomeness of cats to his fellow players, men like Raheem show guys that they can adopt too.
Now if you’ll excuse me, Bud and I have a busy day of lifting weights, watching football, working on the hot rod we’re restoring in the garage, and drinking beer. Then we’re gonna chant Viking drinking songs until we pass out.
Pain In The Bud 