Derek Wolfe went through extremely physically tough times in his NFL career, but his recent mountain lion hunt in Colorado may have been rougher than even that.
“I’ve been through some tough training camps, brother, but this hunt was – man – it beat me up bad,” he told Tucker Carlson on Tucker Carlson Tonight. “I was beat up bad. I’m all cut up and scraped up. I was in full-body cramps [and] barely made it up there.”
The former Denver Broncos defensive lineman tracked and killed the 200-pound, 8.5-foot mountain lion because it had been terrorizing a Colorado community. He downed it with nothing but a bow and arrow.
Wolfe killed the big cat as an act of predator control but has still received negative backlash for killing the big cat. Around 15 pet dogs had been killed by a mountain lion in a 30 day period, so something needed to be done. While Wolfe will use the meat he harvested so the animal doesn’t go to waste, he didn’t pay for the hunt and did it to protect a community from an animal that had become a danger.
“So we get up there and the first thing we see is a full-grown mule deer that he had drug across the road, right across the street from somebody’s house.” Wolfe said. “And then we followed those tracks up to his porch. It was up on this woman’s porch, living underneath of her porch, even. And when we had talked to the landowner, they said, ‘Hey, we have house cats. And the cats are acting weird.’”
He tracked down the cat and finally caught up to it at about 9,600-feet of elevation, so it was one heck of a trek to get to it. When he spotted the mountain lion he managed to line up a clear opening and harvested it with a clean and ethical shot.
“This was completely legal. Colorado Parks and Wildlife came down and checked the cat. And for me, I took the meat and got it processed. I’m going to eat that cat.”
We’d be willing to bet that everyone in that Colorado community is thankful for his efforts in protecting them and their beloved pets by taking out a direct threat.
Here’s to hoping future hunts like this happen to cull the mountain lion problem and reduce attacks.