LOS ANGELES: A Colorado trail runner who survived a mountain lion attack by suffocating the animal said on Thursday that the encounter that has made him the stuff of legend was “a fight for survival.”
“One of the thoughts that I was having was: ‘Well this would be a pretty crappy way to die’,” Travis Kauffman told reporters in his first public comments about the February 4 attack.
“It very much turned into just a full-on fight for survival,” added the 31-year-old who had to have more than two dozen stitches to close wounds on his cheeks and nose.
Kauffman said he had gone out for a run when he was ambushed by the 80-pound (36-kilogram) cat.
“I heard some pine needles rustling behind me and I stopped and turned,” he recalled.
Kauffman, who is of slight build, said he felt his heart sink as he processed the situation and raised his hands and began screaming to try and scare the animal as it rushed toward him.
“Unfortunately, it kept running and then it eventually just lunged at me and ... its jaws locked into my hand and wrist,” he said.
Kauffman said that as he and the mountain lion were locked in battle, they tumbled down a trail and he managed to get the upper hand as the cat ended up on its back.
He said he was able to pin the animal’s hind legs with his feet and hit it with a rock over the head before stepping on its neck and suffocating it.
“I stepped on its neck with my right foot and just slowly after a few minutes I thought I would be getting close and then it would start thrashing again,” he said. “And I had a few more scratches that resulted from those thrashes at that point, and I’d say another couple minutes later it finally stopped moving.”
The whole episode lasted about 10 minutes, after which Kauffman said he ran off, terrified that other mountain lions may be lurking about.
He said he eventually linked up with another runner and some hikers who gave him water and drove him to a hospital.
Kauffman said while the adrenaline rush and survival instinct helped him overcome the encounter, the fact that he chose not to use his earphones to listen to music that day also played a part.
“For the most part, I don’t feel any residual trauma,” he told KUNC radio. “I tend to move forward, this is my personality.”
Authorities have praised his quick-thinking, saying he handled the situation just right.
“We all feel extremely lucky that this attack was made by a young mountain lion on a knowledgeable runner, otherwise we may have been hosting a very different press conference,” said Mark Leslie, a Colorado Parks and Wildlife manager. “These animals are ambush predators, and are trained to take quick and lethal action whenever possible.”
Runner recounts killing mountain lion in ‘fight for survival’
Runner recounts killing mountain lion in ‘fight for survival’
- “One of the thoughts that I was having was: ‘Well this would be a pretty crappy way to die’,” he said
- He said he felt his heart sink as he processed the situation and raised his hands and began screaming
Filipinos master disaster readiness, one roll of the dice at a time
- In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon
MANILA: In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon.
The teenagers huddled around the table leap into action, shouting instructions and acting out the correct strategies for just one of the potential catastrophes laid out in the board game called Master of Disaster.
With fewer than half of Filipinos estimated to have undertaken disaster drills or to own a first-aid kit, the game aims to boost lagging preparedness in a country ranked the most disaster-prone on earth for four years running.
“(It) features disasters we’ve been experiencing in real life for the past few months and years,” 17-year-old Ansherina Agasen told AFP, noting that flooding routinely upends life in her hometown of Valenzuela, north of Manila.
Sitting in the arc of intense seismic activity called the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” the Philippines endures daily earthquakes and is hit by an average of 20 typhoons each year.
In November, back-to-back typhoons drove flooding that killed nearly 300 people in the archipelago nation, while a 6.9-magnitude quake in late September toppled buildings and killed 79 people around the city of Cebu.
“We realized that a lot of loss of lives and destruction of property could have been avoided if people knew about basic concepts related to disaster preparedness,” Francis Macatulad, one of the game’s developers, told AFP of its inception.
The Asia Society for Social Improvement and Sustainable Transformation (ASSIST), where Macatulad heads business development, first dreamt up the game in 2013, after Super Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the central Philippines and left thousands dead.
Launched six years later, Master of Disaster has been updated this year to address more events exacerbated by human-driven climate change, such as landslides, drought and heatwaves.
More than 10,000 editions of the game, aimed at players as young as nine years old, have been distributed across the archipelago nation.
“The youth are very essential in creating this disaster resiliency mindset,” Macatulad said.
‘Keeps on getting worse’
While the Philippines has introduced disaster readiness training into its K-12 curriculum, Master of Disaster is providing a jolt of innovation, Bianca Canlas of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) told AFP.
“It’s important that it’s tactile, something that can be touched and can be seen by the eyes of the youth so they can have engagement with each other,” she said of the game.
Players roll a dice to move their pawns across the board, with each landing spot corresponding to cards containing questions or instructions to act out disaster-specific responses.
When a player is unable to fulfil a task, another can “save” them and receive a “hero token” — tallied at the end to determine a winner.
At least 27,500 deaths and economic losses of $35 billion have been attributed to extreme weather events in the past two decades, according to the 2026 Climate Risk Index.
“It just keeps on getting worse,” Canlas said, noting the lives lost in recent months.
The government is now determining if it will throw its weight behind the distribution of the game, with the sessions in Valenzuela City serving as a pilot to assess whether players find it engaging and informative.
While conceding the evidence was so far anecdotal, ASSIST’s Macatulad said he believed the game was bringing a “significant” improvement in its players’ disaster preparedness knowledge.
“Disaster is not picky. It affects from north to south. So we would like to expand this further,” Macatulad said, adding that poor communities “most vulnerable to the effects of climate change” were the priority.
“Disasters can happen to anyone,” Agasen, the teen, told AFP as the game broke up.
“As a young person, I can share the knowledge I’ve gained... with my classmates at school, with people at home, and those I’ll meet in the future.”
