Are You Kidding Me?

Last week, I followed a story about a family in Colorado who went to sleep, leaving their French doors wide open. During the night, a mountain lion entered the house and killed the family dog, a 12-year-old yellow Lab, dragging it to some nearby brush and hiding it for later.
What happens next is becoming all too common in the sprawl vs. wild animal scenerio. Authorities used the dog's body to lure the mountain lion back, trapping and killing it.
Jennifer Churchill, a spokeswoman for the Division of Wildlife said in a Denver Post article, "A lion that will brazenly go into someone's bedroom we need to be careful of."
Are you kidding me? We move into a wild animal's habitat and live among them, - and some people even leave food out for wild animals - and we expect them not to become less wary of us to the point of even going through an open door, probably to take an animal it sensed was sick?
One article described the owner's initial reaction to the scuffle she heard, saying she got up to see if her beloved 12-year-old dog was having a seizure.
This tells me that her dog was at least sometimes ill, and a prime target for any animal of prey.
And BTW, this isn't an area where it is uncommon to see a mountain lion - it just didn't wander into a suburban neighborhood - this is an area described by officials as "definitely in lion country," - uh, kind of like our house, and we would never, no matter how hot it was, subject ourselves or our dogs to the possibility that something wild might come through an open door at night.
Anyone who knows me knows I love my animals with all my heart and we did have an incident last year in which my 15-year-old Cali Cat was killed because she got off of the porch after we moved(at least that's what we were told, we were in Germany at the time).
Still, while I tried to protect her by blocking her onto the porch, I still had the suburban mentality of her being in our "yard." Wild animals don't recognize yard boundries and we learned that the hard way.
But leaving your doors wide open?
Even if it weren't a mountain lion, wouldn't one be worried about an opposum, squirrel, raccoon or even a skunk coming through?
These people may have lived in their home for over 30 years, but they've learned a lot less about their surroundings in that time than we have in 1 year of living here. And because of their negligence, their family pet, as well as a Mountain Lion who was only acting on his natural senses, are both now dead.
Here's the article from the Denver Post:
http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_10104028