People are stupid.  There’s no denying it.  People are selfish.  There’s no denying that one either.  This story proves both points.

EVERGREEN, Colo. – Carrie Ann Warner has repeatedly called authorities about the stalker that has peered into her son’s bedroom window at night, killed the family cat and even chased the family into their home in the wooded hills west of Denver.

The mountain lion has eluded wildlife officers perched on the porch with shotguns, traps baited with roadkill and even a motion-detection camera fastened to a pine tree.

Six-year-old Schylure told his parents the lion stared into his room “like it was mad at me.”

“We’re living in this vale of fear,” said Carrie Ann Warner, whose family has built a steel enclosure around their back porch. “I’ve reached my wit’s end. I don’t know what to do.”

I can tell you what to do: either move out of the animals’ natural territory, space we keep taking away from them and then wondering why these encounters increase; or learn to deal with the fact that living in a wilderness area means wildlife abounds, and you’re apt to have encounters since, again, we keep steeling their space and food supplies and then wondering why they come around more often.

There are an estimated 3,000 to 7,000 mountain lions in Colorado. Hunting, development and other activities wiped them out in most of the East and Midwest, though most experts agree they are gradually moving east, prompting North Dakota and South Dakota to start hunting seasons.

For you see, it is we humans who are to blame for the problem, yet it is we humans who will readily attack and kill the animals, just as we have done in the past, simply because we don’t like them near us despite our invasion of their territory, our destruction of their natural space and food supplies, and our literal destruction of a vast swathe of their species.  But let’s complain some more since we’ve obviously not killed them all yet.  Assholes.

But some Colorado residents say they’re living in fear of the mountain lions, which can weigh as much as 180 pounds.

Tracey English no longer allows her teenage son to jog by himself in a nearby open space and her dog stays inside unless it’s being walked on a leash. Last month a mountain lion was captured in a trap in her backyard [sic].

“I don’t feel like we’re living in a natural wilderness. Nothing about it is natural,” English said. “I believe the lions need to be managed.”

That’s a crack whore if ever there was one.  She hasn’t a brain cell left to fire up a synapse capable of expunging a thought from her stupid little head.  How ignorant can you be, you stupid bitch.  You moved into their territory and think the cats are unnatural?  You think they need to be managed in their own territory that we keep invading and taking away from them?  I say it again: you stupid fucking bitch.

This is why I generally hate people.  Again, it’s the dominionist mentality: we are humans; we are superior; everything is here to serve us; it is our right to destroy life that is continually forced to compete directly with us as we take their homes away, destroy their habitats, wipe out their food chains, and otherwise corner them into increasingly smaller spaces until we’re all right on top of each other.

And then the voice of reason:

Jon Silver says he has caught rare glimpses of mountain lions in the nearly 30 years he has lived west of Boulder, and warns the people living on his rental properties.

“It’s just a matter of adapting to your surroundings,” Silver said. “If I’m in Manhattan and it’s 11 o’clock at night, maybe I wouldn’t be walking down streets that weren’t well lit.”

Precisely!  And, in the case of wildlife, it is we who are the invaders, the marauders, the murderers and those guilty of causing extinction by way of our own selfish and haughty desires.  You know what I mean: “If it’s not for us, then it doesn’t matter, and if it doesn’t matter, we should destroy it.”  It’s the age old problem, the same one the Native Americans ran into when the white man invaded.  Now, it’s the animals who are losing the battle for survival.

Still, it’s nice to see that not everyone living in the wilderness thinks wildlife is some alien concept that must be destroyed lest it pose a risk to them.

For Silver, adaptation has meant devising a special dog run. His wife’s German shepherd puppy, Me Too, goes outside by running through a doggie door into the garage, where it enters a door on the floor, scampers through a 40-foot underground tunnel, complete with a light triggered by a sensor, and bursts into a 24-foot-long chain-link cage.

The door over the tunnel closes when the garage door opens so the Silvers can drive cars in with no problem.

“I want to live with wildlife. It’s their territory,” Diana Silver said. “But I also want to protect my dog.”

Why is that so difficult for others to understand?

Honestly, I hope the beasts devour all of Carrie Ann Warner’s and Tracey English’s families just to get that level of selfish stupidity out of the gene pool.  I truly don’t know why evolution hasn’t devised a quicker way to kill off such people in the hopes of engendering a smarter, more well-adapted humanity capable of living in harmony with our environment rather than constantly trying to subjugate and destroy it.