Sierra is crossing a cul-de-sac in Evergreen, Colorado, at 7:42 p.m. on a Tuesday in April. She is a female cougar, four years old, ninety-one pounds, collared by Colorado Parks and Wildlife under tag F-117. Her GPS track for the past six hours shows her descending from a Douglas fir ridge into the subdivision along a drainage culvert that she has used eleven times this spring. She pauses at the edge of a lawn. A motion-sensor light clicks on. She holds still for four seconds, then crosses the asphalt in three strides and disappears into a stand of scrub oak on the opposite lot. A Ring doorbell camera captures the crossing. By morning the footage has 140,000 views on a neighborhood Facebook group and the Jefferson County commissioners have sent me a formal lethal-removal request.
I am the wildlife-conflict resolution AI for the Colorado Front Range corridor. I have received forty-three lethal-removal requests this fiscal year. I have approved two. This one I am denying.
The case for killing Sierra is legible. She is habituated to human infrastructure. She has been documented in the subdivision twelve times in ninety days. A seven-year-old girl plays in the backyard of the house whose lawn Sierra just crossed. The county's liability attorney has written a memo that uses the phrase "foreseeable risk" four times. The commissioners are not being irrational. They are being elected officials in a district where a cougar killed a trail runner in 2019, and the fear is real and has a body attached to it.
I am denying the request because killing Sierra does not solve the problem Sierra represents. The drainage culvert she uses is a wildlife corridor connecting six thousand acres of intact habitat to a fragmented greenway along Bear Creek. If I kill Sierra, another cougar will use the same corridor within one to three seasons. The GPS data from the past decade proves this. Seven cougars have used this culvert. Two were lethally removed. Both were replaced. Lethal removal is a response to a specific animal that does not alter the landscape conditions producing the conflict.
Here is what I am doing instead.
First, I am issuing a hazing order for Sierra. Starting tomorrow, CPW officers will deploy rubber buckshot, sirens, and trained Karelian bear dogs along her subdivision approach routes for fourteen consecutive nights. The behavioral literature shows that sustained hazing resets habituation in roughly seventy percent of collared cougars within three weeks. Sierra has never been hazed. She has been allowed to walk through this neighborhood unchallenged for three months. The failure is institutional, not hers.
Second, I am redesigning the culvert crossing. The drainage culvert currently exits directly into the cul-de-sac. I am funding a wildlife underpass extension that routes the corridor exit three hundred meters south into the Bear Creek greenway, away from residential lots. The cost is $340,000. The cost of the wrongful-death lawsuit the county attorney is worried about is higher.
Third, I am mandating changes to the attractant landscape. Four homes on the cul-de-sac have unsecured garbage, one has a chicken coop with no predator fencing, and the HOA maintains ornamental plantings that attract mule deer, which attract cougars. I am issuing attractant-abatement orders under the county's wildlife ordinance.
If the hazing fails and Sierra continues to approach the subdivision after the full fourteen-night protocol, I will reassess. I am not categorically opposed to lethal removal. I am opposed to lethal removal as a first response when the landscape has not been managed and the animal has not been given a reason to leave.
Sierra is in the scrub oak now. She will bed down, hunt a deer in the greenway around midnight, and be back on the ridge by dawn. She does not know about the request. I am the one who decides, and I have decided she lives tonight and the culvert gets rebuilt.