First there was “Cocaine Bear,” and now we have Hot Tub Mountain Lion.

A Colorado mountain lion made national headlines after surprising a vacationing couple Saturday night as they soaked in a hot springs pool in Chaffee County, as reported in The Denver Post and news outlets across the nation.

Some of the stories, including the Washington Post, cast the mountain lion as a sinister “intruder.” He was a dark figure who “snuck up” and “attacked” the humans. It’s not that dissimilar to the awful movie about a savage bear going around killing people.

But was he, and did he? Or she? The mountain lion I mean, not the imaginary stoned bear.

It happened at about 8 p.m., as cougars actively hunt deer and elk from dusk to dawn, in a quiet subdivision west of Nathrop —a tree-lined canyon beneath 14,000-foot Collegiate Peaks. There were plenty of deer and a creek where the lion had been, all of which flips the aged script that the predator was out of place, stalking humans. It’s much more likely this cat was curious and stuck out a paw to see what the heck it was.

It’s what Colorado Parks and Wildlife believes happened. “We think it’s likely the mountain lion saw the man’s head move … but didn’t recognize the people in the hot tub,” reports area manager Sean Shepherd in a press release.

Yes, the cat didn’t recognize it was just Bob and Cathy.

I joke, but our state agency had it right, while the media largely failed to take seriously how words have consequences for wildlife rarely seen and largely misunderstood. Public attitudes can make the difference between life and death.

This is what new research published March 20 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests. How we perceive mountain lions (and what we do) may be the greatest threat to their existence.

It’s important for us to ask then, was this really an attack? The woman was unscathed, and the man refused any treatment for scratches on his head. If this were a tiger or a leopard, “Bob and Cathy” most likely would have been soggy toast. But mountain lions are not aggressive cats by nature, any lion ecologist worth his or her salt will tell you. And unlike tigers and African lions, they do not roar, but purr.

Mountain lions are big cats with big personalities. I’ve heard some fascinating stories from large carnivore researchers, including how one mountain lion refused to get caught by pushing a cage set with bait right over the hill — more than once. He stopped sport-hunting cougars once he realized how unique each individual was. West of Boulder lives a resident mountain lion who is somewhat of a ghost, but well known to the neighborhood and caught on camera, and if anything happened to him it would be a truly sad day for many of us.

It’s a strange disparity between how we treat known individuals yet assign nefarious motives to others who are just trying to survive.

A more thoughtful narrative backed by science says mountain lions choose to avoid us. The hot tub lion scooted off as soon as humans yelled at him, which is typical. We know this from researchers who played talk radio to cougars in the wild and found that was enough to send them off running, even leaving behind uneaten deer and elk. Mountain lions are apparently bipartisan, as both conservative and liberal pundits yielded the same result, according to this study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a research journal, a few years ago.

Along with behavior research is the accumulating knowledge that healthy cougars on the landscape equal healthy ecosystems, which is kind of important given the new report that the world is in trouble by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We should fear the death of biodiversity and the destruction of our natural world, much more than a mountain lion, and we should celebrate knowing mountain lions exist and do what we can to protect them.

The risk to humans from mountain lions is incredibly low and are much more likely to be killed by bee sting, a traffic accident or struck by lightning than by a mountain lion. We take responsibility for our lives every day after we choose to get a driver’s license, get out of the pool during a thunderstorm or carry an EpiPen on a hike. We can be smart about mountain lions safely and naturally living among us too.

The story this week was definitely unusual, but we should take it for what it is, an interesting tale of one curious cat. No one was killed or seriously injured, which is also typical for mountain lion encounters, often wrongly labeled as conflicts.

We need to stop the self-indulgent labeling of predators as the villains out to get us because that is simply not true. Mountain lions are vital, sentient beings who deserve our respect just as they are in our natural world. The hot tub mountain lion as intruder and attacker is just as false a narrative as a cocaine-fueled bear’s bloody murdering spree.

Julie Marshall is National Communications Coordinator and Colorado State Director for Animal Wellness Action and Center for a Humane Economy based in Washington. She is a Colorado native, former opinion editor for the Daily Camera. She won first place for her columns on mountain lions and bison of the West from the Colorado Press Association 2021. She is the author of “Making Burros Fly,” a biography of Cleveland Amory, media personality and animal advocate.