Beware of Preschoolers

By Keith Kloor | February 26, 2009 5:12 pm

Since I moved last August to Boulder, Colorado (temporarily), I’ve been a wee bit concerned about the mountain lions that occasionally pass through my Foothills neighborhood. (Yes, I know, I’m on their turf.)

My attitude has veered between healthy respect, outright fear, and typical, cartoonish New York bravado (who you looking at?).

My four year old son has somehow picked up only on the fear, so I can never get him to take out the garbage on his own yet. (Yeah, right, I don’t let him get more than a foot away from me–ever.)

Anyway, turns out that I was worried about the wrong animal species. The poor little guy got bit by one of his classmates in preschool yesterday. The little bugger who bit him broke the skin and left teeth marks too.

So I guess that should be the next metric that makes its way into a mountain lion story: how many preschoolers get bit every year by one of their buds, compared to how many get bit by a mountain lion.

Of course, when I get home after dark, I still make a beeline from the driveway to the front door. Can’t take any chances.

CATEGORIZED UNDER: mountain lion, preschooler
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About Keith Kloor

Keith Kloor is a freelance journalist and adjunct professor of journalism at New York University. His work has appeared in Slate, Science, Discover, Nature Climate Change, Archaeology, and Audubon Magazine, among other outlets. From 2000 to 2008, he was a senior editor at Audubon Magazine. In 2008-2009, he was a Fellow at the University of Colorado’s Center for Environmental Journalism, in Boulder, where he studied how a changing environment (including climate change) influenced prehistoric societies in the U.S. Southwest. He covers a wide range of topics, from conservation biology and biotechnology to urban planning and archaeology.

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