Daniel E Wolf
Need a break from the dregs of winter? Yeah, me too. In honor of spring having finally sprung, here’s your daily dose of juvenile social-media cuteness.
I love everything about this: From the expression on the cub’s face, to the hilarious captions, to the site name “cheerful_nihilism.” Bravo.
Sometimes, like yesterday, I indulge in a bit of playful lighthearted tongue-in-cheek that, though it might offend the thin-skinned, at least it doesn’t do so intentionally. Other times, not so much. Today I am reproducing in its entirety a piece titled “A Different March Madness: Online Hate for the Athletes.”
Admittedly these are First-World problems. But given our flawed human nature, and the fact that college sports is a lightning rod, it’s a real problem. So, to my way of thinking, “…should be left for dead in a ditch…” is the kind of toxic comment best left out of any and all sports conversations. Period.
Sadly, although social media has made things more complicated of late, this isn’t a new problem. Back in the late 80’s after then-Arizona Wildcats guard (now-Golden State Warriors coach) Steve Kerr’s father Malcolm had been abducted and murdered by terrorists in Beirut, Steve was heckled mercilessly during away games by student-sections at rival Pac-10 schools. “Hey, Steve, where’s your dad?” would be tasteless under most circumstances. But given the horrific backstory, it was waaaay beyond the pale.
I leave it to you, gentle readers, to suss out where a line, if any, should be drawn in these shifting NCAA sands. And I admit that in times past I often found the antics of Duke’s “Crazies” – directed against visiting players and coaches – utterly hilarious. Then again, if it were my kid playing an away game at Cameron Indoor, I’d probably find it a lot less funny.
But no matter what, I still stand by my ongoing boycott of ‘Bama guard Brandon Miller. The simple fact remains, I really don’t care what anyone else has to say on that sorry subject. Full stop. End of story.
HOUSTON (AP) — It wasn’t so much that social media was criticizing his son. That happens sometimes — especially after a loss like THAT.
But when a post came up suggesting Terrance Williams II, a junior forward for Michigan, be left for dead in a ditch, his dad decided enough was enough. Terrance Williams Sr.’s profanity-laced response to all the haters was, in many ways, an expected byproduct of social media vitriol that bubbled up after the Wolverines blew an eight-point lead in a one-point loss to Vanderbilt earlier this month — not in the NCAA Tournament but in the NIT.
“You actually root for them when they’re good,” Williams Sr. said of the Michigan fans in an interview with The Associated Press two days after the season-ending loss. “But then they make a mistake, and a game doesn’t go your way and you turn to hate. That’s unacceptable.”
The episode was just one of countless examples of the toxic minefield that athletes, coaches, friends and family face all too often on social media, all of it amplified for college basketball players when the calendar flips to March and the madness begins.
College administrators and coaches alike have warned for several years that students and athletes are facing increasing mental-health challenges exacerbated by the pandemic. And never have there been more outside voices that not only scrutinize every move players make on the court, but impact their emotional well-being away from it.
“The feedback right now, it can be so harsh and it’s so immediate, and I think that’s the hardest part,” said Melissa Streno, a Denver-based mental health consultant for high-level athletes. “It’s the immediacy of the feedback from people they don’t even know. And it can be so impactful on their identity and how they see themselves as a player on the court.”
Turning off social media is one option, but it’s not really practical, not with the way society interacts in the 21st century. And many athletes use social media to open the door to cash. It comes with a toll.
A survey conducted by the NCAA in the fall of 2021 found spikes among athletes who experienced mental exhaustion, anxiety and depression compared with a similar survey two years earlier — before the pandemic, and also before name-image-likeness deals became an everyday reality of college sports. The survey also found that despite a growing recognition of mental health as something to be addressed, fewer than half the respondents felt comfortable seeking support from a counselor on campus.
Even so, those counselors have been busy; a growing number of questions they field from the players involve how to manage social media.
“For some of them, social media brings pressure to put out information, to create content, build their brand and that can cause anxiety,” said Charron Sumler, a former college basketball player who is now an athletic counselor at Ohio State. “On the flip side, there’s the input where they’re receiving messages. And with phones in the locker room, sometimes they’re receiving that negative feedback and content before they’ve even had a chance to debrief with their coaches or with themselves.”
Just this month, Virginia’s Kihei Clark started trending for the wrong reasons when his ill-advised pass at the end of a first-round March Madness game against Furman allowed the Paladins to make the game-winning 3-pointer that sent the Cavaliers home.
After the game, Clark sat in the locker room and patiently answered every question. Predictably, social media was destroying him before the final buzzer even sounded.
Among those who knew the feeling was Matthew Fisher-Davis. He was the Vanderbilt guard who, thinking the Commodores were trailing, fouled a Northwestern player in the waning seconds of a first-round game in 2017. In fact, Vanderbilt was ahead by one; Northwestern made both free throws after the foul and won by a point.
Before the next season, Fisher-Davis released a slickly produced video showing him working out, the main theme of which was: “Everybody’s got something to say.”
“It gets to the point where, the stuff coming from outside the locker room doesn’t make anything easier,” Fisher-Davis told the AP in an interview this month.
Stanford’s Haley Jones was named most outstanding player at the women’s Final Four after helping the Cardinal win the national title in 2021. Two weeks ago, when Stanford made an early exit from this year’s March Madness, Jones’ performance — and her prospects for the upcoming WNBA draft — were being dissected, sometimes cruelly, on social media.
“Right after every game. I know what I did well, and I know what I didn’t do well,” said Jones, who is part of a program called Game 4 Good that focuses on mental wellness for athletes. “I don’t need to go and listen to thousands of people who don’t know me tell me these same things, and probably say it in a lot meaner way.”
On rare occasions, players get ripped for doing something good.
In an episode that illustrates the parallel explosive growth of both social media and online sports wagering, TCU’s Damion Baugh was the object of scorn in the second round this month when he launched a shot at the buzzer from near the halfcourt logo in a game that had already been sealed by Gonzaga.
Baugh’s 3 went in. It trimmed TCU’s final deficit to three, which allowed the Horned Frogs to cover the 4.5-point spread. That shot did nothing to change the brackets, but it did flip millions of dollars across the country and Baugh was roundly ripped on Twitter.
Baugh barked back: “I don’t get how y’all mad because I played until the last buzzer.”
Former Ohio State guard E.J. Liddell also felt compelled to defend himself after he missed a late free throw that was key to an upset loss to Oral Roberts two years ago.
“Honestly, what did I do to deserve this? I’m human,” he said in a post in which he posted screenshots of some of the insults directed at him, including a death threat.
Even one of social media’s biggest stars, Oregon’s Sedona Prince, who became famous after her video outlining the disparity between men’s and women’s weight rooms at the 2021 NCAA Tournaments went viral, had to take a brief break last year from TikTok.
“I’m not any different because I’m on TikTok. I’m still a person,” Prince said in a tearful video since taken down, while acknowledging her mental health had been declining.
Streno, the mental health consultant, said social media can exacerbate depression and anxiety.
During a three-month stretch last spring, at least five college athletes died by suicide. Among the reasons given by friends and family were the constant pressure of performing at a high level, the pressure to maintain a certain weight or physique, the fear of being perceived as weak because of injuries and the limited social opportunities because of the demands of a sports schedule.
Given the amount of daily interaction athletes have with friends and family on social media apps, Streno said it’s more realistic to coach players on how to deal with feedback than simply advising them to shut down everything.
“If it were as simple as ‘don’t look at your phone,’ then this wouldn’t be an issue,” she said. “But there’s such a quick, immediate, ‘Oh, this must mean this about me. I’m not good enough, or I’m not living up to this level.’ And then your mind can kind of start going down into this spiral.”
Williams, the father of the Michigan forward, said his son does a good job of shutting out social media during the season. After the events of this month, the dad planned on going dark for a while, too.
“People said he didn’t play well, and I get that,” Williams said. “But when you say my son, who I’ve raised and who I love tremendously, that you wish him to be dead in a ditch, that’s when I’ve got to turn the switch.”
First off, right out of the gate, let me state categorically and unequivocally that this post has nothing whatsoever to do with any current news story. All similarities between the terms “Hush Money” and “Shush, Honey” are entirely coincidental. Got that, Alvin Bragg? Good.
Second, I realize this post is probably going to offend at least half of my readership, maybe even more than half. For that I sincerely apologize in advance. Also, we’ll probably lose our PG-rating. On the flip side of the coin… GROW UP ya big buncha babies! There. I feel much better now. I do trust if any of this puts your knickers in a twist you’ll eventually get everything straightened out. After all, hope springs eternal. Also this: Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Now, let’s proceed with a visual, shall we? And you get to decide who it is. No, the correct answer is neither “Marilyn Monroe” nor “Monica Lewinsky.” If you guessed either of those esteemed past presidential consorts, I say to you, “Nice try, but no cigar.”
The following item which I found quite enlightening is lifted from a periodical I can’t, for contractual reasons, publicly name – but you’ve probably heard of it. And if you’d like to read it in full and in situ, you can do so, here. For convenience sake, I’ve plagiarized it in its entirety, below. (You’re welcome.) And should anyone desire to take me to task – or, Allah forbid, to sue me – please leave your attorney’s name along with a self-addressed stamped envelope in the comments section. In the event that we here at dewconsulting.net find fit to pay you off – you know, so as to make any alleged unpleasantness disappear – a Swiss bank account number would also be most helpful. Thanks. Glad we got all that out of the way up front. And now, on with the show.
Is it a stretch to submit that Donald Trump faces a looming indictment for mishandling a payoff to the porn star Stormy Daniels and not, say, for inciting an insurrection, because the Daniels case has an obvious tagline? Pick any news outlet — Times, Fox, Breitbart: It’s always the “hush-money case.” Here’s a concept you can sell. Epsteins, Weinsteins, Charlie Sheens. It’s easily comprehensible, onomatopoeic. Hush. The term is sultry, lubricious; typically what’s being hushed is evidence of sex. Unlike the confidential legal settlement or the corporate N.D.A., hush money carries a whiff of the entrepreneurial. When Joseph Addison and Richard Steele started The Tatler, in 1709, they courted it. “I expect hush-money to be regularly sent for every folly or vice any one commits in this whole town,” Steele wrote. He was the first to employ the term but not the practice; for about as long as people have been saying stuff, others have been paying them not to. In Genesis, the King of Gerar tries to seduce Abraham’s wife, then pays him off with sheep, oxen, and servants. The King calls it “a covering of the eyes.” See nothing, say nothing.
What’s the going rate these days for silence? Inflation doesn’t compute precisely for sheep and oxen. Michael Jackson paid two hundred million. Bill Cosby paid three and a half, Bill O’Reilly forty-five. The sum depends on what you’re trying to hush up. When Bette Davis’s husband recorded her in bed with Howard Hughes, she paid him seventy-five thousand dollars to keep it private. Jerry Falwell, Jr., provided the pool boy, whom Falwell liked to watch in bed with his own wife, with around two million. (Michael Cohen, Trump’s fixer, helped broker a deal.) Rudy Giuliani, in his capacity as Trump’s lawyer, once offered a mathematical model. “I never thought a hundred thirty thousand was a real payment,” he said, of the sum Trump paid to Daniels. “It’s a nuisance payment. When I settle it as real or a real possibility, it’s a couple million dollars.”
“That’s a preposterous statement,” the victims’-rights lawyer Gloria Allred said last week, when solicited for an expert opinion. “It’s not like buying a car.” A few years ago, Allred was criticized in the Times for negotiating a confidentiality settlement between a client and Harvey Weinstein. In response, she noted that the settlement didn’t preclude criminal charges; it was just a modicum of justice. She thought “hush money” conveyed the wrong message. “It’s a negative term,” she said. (William Safire called it “always strongly pejorative.”) “There’s nothing inherently wrong, and there’s a lot that’s right, when two people want to settle a matter.”
Through the ages, hush money has nevertheless been associated with dirty dealing. Thucydides hinted at it disapprovingly, Dickens scorned the payee more than the payer, Dostoyevsky viewed it as a transaction on the road to Hell. Sweeney Todd was hit up for hush money by his tonsorial rival; he slit the guy’s throat instead.
In the real world, the power dynamics are often lopsided. An alarming number of silencers are Presidents and their ilk: Hamilton, Jefferson, John Edwards. J.F.K. paid hush money of sorts, in the form of political capital, to J. Edgar Hoover, who’d discovered one of his affairs. Warren Harding sent hush money every year to a spurned mistress in possession of his love letters, which featured recurring characters that included Jerry the Penis. “Wish I could take you to Mount Jerry,” Harding wrote in one. “Wonderful spot.”
On the Watergate tapes, discussing the burglars, Nixon may have uttered the phrase “hush money” to his adviser Charles W. Colson, or maybe just something that sounded like it. (“Shush, honey”?) Decades later, Trump was recorded discussing a different mistress with Cohen. Was that Trump saying “Pay with cash”? Giuliani, never one to self-hush, argued on Fox News that Trump actually said, “Don’t pay with cash.” Giuliani explained that he had experience with surreptitious recordings: “How about four thousand hours of Mafia people on tape? I know how to listen to them, I know how to transcribe them. I’ve dealt with much worse tapes than this.” Folly, vice. Cover thine eyes.
What’s a wrongdoer to do? A call was placed to Eric Dezenhall, a crisis-management specialist who has advised such clients as the Sacklers and Exxon-Mobil and who has consulted on scores of secret settlements. “One of the things you hear is, It’s the coverup that gets you,” Dezenhall said. “That’s not true! This shouldn’t be taken as something I advise or support, but coverups work all the time.”
Of course, they work only if the public doesn’t hear about them. “Twenty years ago, if you wrote somebody a check to stay quiet, it would stay quiet,” Dezenhall said. “The problem today is people take your money, and then they go on TV anyway.” Not all of them, though. Who knows what Dezenhall’s clients — billionaires, celebrities — have kept hushed up? Dezenhall does, but he couldn’t possibly say. ♦
When I get on my knees to say my prayers at night, I thank the Good Lord for giving us 45: Not because I’m a zombie-eyed election denier. Nor because I support him over, say, rival Ron DeSantis for the 2024 GOP presidential nod. Nor even because I love watching him tweak the noses, time and again, of all those self-righteous pundits from across the political spectrum on TV. No, but rather, this: I’m thankful that he provides us with an unfailingly rich stream of pop-culture fodder that’s waaaay more interesting than Joe Biden’s faltering mental status ever could be. And visuals far more entertaining than RMN’s scowling post-Watergate visage ever provided anyone. Alright, I admit, Warren G. Harding’s immortal “Wish I could take you to Mount Jerry – Wonderful spot” is pretty good as quotes go – but still.
Truth to tell, I have never watched even a single episode of Celebrity .Apprentice, and I never hope to. But for keeping things interesting on a daily basis, there’s none finer anywhere on the national stage than DJT. I mean, c’mon: Who’d you rather see on your evening news, huh? Vlad the Impaler paired with a camo-clad one-time comedian named Volodymyr Zelensky? Or Don the Feckless and Inscrutable paired with a porn star named Stormy the Buxom clad only in minimalist blue-lace leisure attire? I for one am here to tell you: It’s no contest, folks. Not even close.
Oh, and also: “Shush, Honey.”
Happy TMI Day, everybody! On this day in history 44 years ago, an accident at the nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River (10 miles downstream from Harrisburg) led to a radiation release that made it the worst accident in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry. A full blow-by-blow account from History.com is here. A previous post focusing on environmental health impacts of radiation exposure is here. And for those of you keeping score at home: “The reactor had come within less than an hour of a complete meltdown.”
Today’s bonus quiz concerns the name “Three Mile Island.” If TMI is located ten miles from the state capitol, then what is it three miles from? A plethora of good vibes – and perhaps even a valuable prize? – await the first person with the correct answer in the comments section. Good luck!
I’ll post an extended comment tomorrow explaining all the gory details of the name’s origin. For what it’s worth, it isn’t as simple as you might at first think. And for those of you who can’t bear to wait, you can read it for yourself right now, right here.
Once asked to write a full short story in six words, legend has it novelist Ernest Hemingway responded: “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
And yet, and yet… how about this one… eh, Chihuahua lovers?
More brief brilliance from NPR is here.
“Now I obsessively count the words.” — Larry Smith
“Life is one big editorial meeting.” — Gloria Steinem
“The miserable childhood leads to royalties.” — Frank McCourt
“Acting is not all I am.” — Molly Ringwald
Got a favorite? Let us know!
I started out reading a New Yorker piece called “The Myth of the Alpha Wolf” largely because of my last name. I didn’t really expect where it was going to end up. (For the lucky few of you with a subscription, you can read it here. A summary is below.) The upshot? Science doesn’t care what you believe. Don’t believe me? Well, it’s on a t-shirt, so it must be true – right?
The year I was born (1958) a guy named David Mech came up with the notion of the Alpha Wolf – and more generally, the formulation of how wolf societies are organized and maintained – while doing research for his doctoral thesis in wildlife ecology at Purdue. As it turns out, a lot of his ideas came from studying wolves in captivity. And also as it turns out, much of what he believed at the time to be true of wolves in general was rubbish, at least as it relates to packs in the wild. So much so, in fact, that after the introduction of radio collar tracking and the resultant increased understanding of wild wolf behavior and societies, he asked the publisher of his 1970 best-selling book on the subject to stop printing it. That’s a pretty strong endorsement for a changed view of the world: Y’think?
The fact is, a concept like “Alpha Wolf,” whether true or not, is very compelling to us humans. That means it takes on a descriptive life of its own quite apart from any basis in actual fact, either for wolves, or for us. I won’t bore you with all the details. For that, you’ll have to click the link and read it for yourself. But the truth is a lot more fantastical than fiction. And it follows a pattern more commonplace in the annals of the history of science than most people realize.
Just as (to pick one random example) peptic ulcers were once thought to be the result of too much stomach acid, and instead were found to be the product of a rogue gut bacteria, so too with wolves splitting off from their packs of origin. Turns out, it’s not family fights over who gets to be “Alpha” that tells the tale. Instead it has to do with a single-celled parasite called Toxoplasma gondii. I won’t spoil your fun by telling you exactly how all this works. But if you’ve ever suffered from a peptic ulcer and got treated with antacids (not very effective), you’ll be more likely to appreciate the unlikely link if your condition was cured with antibiotics (near 100% effective). A lot more likely, at least, than if you just happened to watch Leo DiCaprio cavorting across the silver screen in the Wolf of Wall Street.
Bottom line, you’re welcome to believe what you want. “Alpha Wolf” carries a strong descriptive allure, after all. From Romulus and Remus nursed by a she-wolf at the founding of Rome, all the way down to today, wolf-lore runs rampant – and largely unfettered by the constraints of research. But just as the smart money for stomach ulcers is now on Amoxicillin rather than Tums, so too if you want to understand how wolf-packs form and are maintained, you’d be well-advised to follow the trail of T. gondii. Why? Well of course science really doesn’t care what you believe. Any more than a wolf does.
When I retire, aside from visiting my kids scattered across the globe, I plan to walk. A lot. Why? Well, for one thing, it’s free. Cheaper than golf, at least. Healthy. Easy on the joints. No special equipment or training necessary. (Sorry, James, no bike-packing for me.)
I guess that’s why the following opinion piece in praise of walking caught my eye. (NYT subscibers can read it here.) Called “Whatever the Problem, It’s Probably Solved by Walking,” it not only sings walking’s praises, but it has more quotes per square inch than anything I’ve read in a long, long time. From Hippocrates to Thoreau, I counted 17 total name-drops. But you can double check me on that by following along below.
Walking is the worst-kept secret I know. Its rewards hide under every step.
Perhaps because we take walking so much for granted, many of us often ignore its ample gifts. In truth, I doubt I would walk often or very far if its sole benefit was physical, despite the abundant proof of its value in that regard. There’s something else at play in walking that interests me more. And with the arrival of spring, attention must be paid.
I discovered the power of ambling more than a quarter century ago when I traipsed 500 miles across Spain on the Camino de Santiago, an ancient pilgrimage route. I stumbled upon the Camino by accident and then trudged across Spain with purpose. I’ve been a walker ever since. And I’m not the only one.
Hippocrates proclaimed that “walking is man’s best medicine.” The good doctor also knew that walking provided more than mere physical benefits when he suggested: “If you are in a bad mood, go for a walk. If you are still in a bad mood, go for another walk.” He was alluding to what so many who came after would attest, that walking not only nourishes the body but also soothes the mind while it burns off tension and makes our troubles recede into a more manageable perspective.
Soren Kierkegaard agreed when he confessed, “I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.” And Charles Dickens was even more direct. “If I could not walk far and fast,” he wrote, “I think I should just explode and perish.”
But walking does more than keep the devil from the door. The Welsh poet (and sometime vagabond) W.H. Davies wrote:
Now shall I walk
Or shall I ride?
“Ride,” Pleasure said.
“Walk,” Joy replied.
Walking buoys the spirits in a way that feels real and earned. It feels owned. And walking, like a generous partner, meets us more than halfway.
There’s abundant testimony that a good ramble fuels creativity. William Wordsworth swore by walking, as did Virginia Woolf. So did William Blake. Thomas Mann assured us, “Thoughts come clearly while one walks.” J.K. Rowling observed that there is “nothing like a nighttime stroll to give you ideas,” while the turn-of-the-20th-century novelist Elizabeth von Arnim concluded that walking “is the perfect way of moving if you want to see into the life of things.”
And ask any deep thinker about the benefits of what Bill Bryson calls the “tranquil tedium” walking elicits. Jean-Jacques Rousseau admitted, “There is something about walking that animates and activates my ideas.” Even the resolutely pessimistic Friedrich Nietzsche had to give it up for a good saunter when he allowed, “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.”
While my own ruminations may not approach the lofty heights to which Nietzsche referred, a good long walk, or even one not so long, begins to carve out space between my thoughts that allows clarity to rise up through my shoes in a way that no other mode of transport does. The travel writer and scholar Patrick Leigh Fermor put it succinctly when he said, “All horsepower corrupts.”
Until I went to Spain with the sole mission of crossing the country on foot, I often considered walking a waste of my time. The Camino changed that. The monthlong walk revealed me to myself in a way nothing else had — my looping pattern of thinking, my habitual emotion cycles, my fearful nature. The Camino wore down my resistance to seeing myself, and then step after step built me back up. It altered my place in the world.
Instead of viewing walking as simply the slowest way to get somewhere, I grew to see it not only as a means to an end, but as the event itself. And since I walked the Camino for a second time last year with my 19-year-old son, I’ve come to understand walking as among the most valuable things I can do.
The writer Rebecca Solnit pointed out that walking “is how the body measures itself against the earth.” And through such physical communion, walking offers up its crowning gift by bringing us emotionally, even spiritually, home to ourselves. When on the last day of our walk my son turned to me and said, “Dad, that’s the only ‘10 out of 10’ thing I’ve ever done in my life,” I knew he had arrived not only in Santiago de Compostela, but, more meaningfully, in himself.
The great naturalist John Muir keenly observed, “I only went out for a walk and … going out, I found, was really going in.” Has anyone ever emerged from ambling through nature for an hour and regretted their improved state of being? Perhaps this is what that dedicated walker Henry David Thoreau was referring to when he wrote, “I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees.”
So the secret is out there. It’s under the leaves on the trail. It’s right there on the sidewalk. Spring has sprung. Lace up.
Any suggestions on where in the world I should ramble? Spain? Scotland? New Zealand? East Timor? I’m open to just about anything, so leave me a comment and give me your best advice. In the meantime, this morning after I lace up, I’ll step out my front door and head… East? West? North? South? The possibilities are almost endless. Below are some shots from close to home, just up the hill on Trail 19.
In this week’s New Yorker cartoon by John McNamee, the correct answer to complete the caption below is… <you make the call>.
“Looks like Congress might finally do something about _________”
A) Hunter Biden
B) Dirty Banks
C) Twitter Layoffs
D) TikTok
E) Spy Balloons
F) Stormy Daniels
G) Global Warming
H) Egg Prices
I) The Debt Ceiling
___________ <<<<< Insert your favorite hot-button issue here.
For what it’s worth, the correct answer will be in the comments… tomorrow.
“All good things come to him who waits.”
Some days the Internet memes come flying so thick and fast, if you blink, you’ll miss one. Or twenty. So no matter what, don’t blink. And just in case you were wondering, there’s only ten total, so rest easy.
That last shot from Nathrop, CO near Mt. Princeton Hot Springs
brings to mind this recent story from the DP.
Full story is here.
A mountain lion snuck up on a man and his wife Saturday night as they were soaking in a hot tub west of Nathrop, CO Parks and Wildlife officials said in a release. The two sat in their vacation rental’s tub around 8 p.m., when the man felt something grab his head.
“He and his wife began screaming and splashing water at the animal,” CPW spokesman Bill Vogrin said.
The woman grabbed a flashlight and shined it on the lion, which began to back up a bit. As the couple continued to scream, the lion moved to the top of a nearby hill where it continued to watch the couple, who then left the tub and went back into their Chaffee County house.
Inside, the couple cleaned the man’s wounds and called state wildlife officials, who arrived and began searching for the lion. The man who suffered four scratches to the top of his head and near his right ear, declined any additional medical assistance. State wildlife officials decided against tracking the lion with dogs because of nearby housing developments and the Mt. Princeton Hot Springs Resort. Instead they set a trap to try and catch the predator.
“We think it’s likely the mountain lion saw the man’s head move in the darkness at ground-level but didn’t recognize the people in the hot tub,” Sean Shepherd, CPW area wildlife manager based in Salida, said. “The couple did the right thing by making noise and shining a light on the lion.”
There. So now you know.
Let’s all be careful out there, hot-tubbers!
The weekly weather report: Classless vs. classic. You make the call.
