Claim:
A mountain lion broke into a Colorado Springs, Colorado, pet store and rolled around in catnip on May 4, 2022.
Rating:
Rating: False
A rumor has circulated online since at least September 2025 claiming that employees at a Colorado Springs pet store found a mountain lion rolling around in catnip in the store’s cat toy aisle. Snopes readers emailed us to ask about the authenticity of the rumor.
The most popular instance of the story appeared on the Facebook page StoryTime (archived), receiving over 192,000 reactions. The post displayed a picture of a mountain lion entering an aisle, with another inset image showing it rolling around in catnip. The story featured the following headline: “Mountain lion breaks into pet store, finds catnip aisle.”
Another Facebook post (archived) claimed that the mountain lion “raided” the pet store and started acting like a “giant housecat” after finding the catnip. The rumor also spread to other social media sites like X (archived). Some of those posts (archived) featured links leading to articles hosted by WordPress blogs, such as one advertisement-filled story hosted on the ifeg.info (archived) website. The posts all told the same story:
In Colorado Springs, a local pet store was preparing for its morning rush of customers when workers found an unexpected guest. Security footage revealed a mountain lion had slipped in overnight, padding silently through the aisles like it owned the place. It ignored the dog food, skipped past the bird seed, and made a beeline straight for one section: cat toys.
After sniffing around, the big cat stopped at the catnip shelf, pawed a bag down, ripped it open, and immediately flopped onto the floor. Rolling back and forth, it rubbed its face and paws in the catnip, completely intoxicated by its new discovery.
When employees unlocked the doors, they were stunned to find the “customer” sprawled out in the toy aisle, surrounded by shredded bags of catnip. Wildlife officers carefully coaxed the lion outside before relocating it back into the nearby hills.
Experts explained that while mountain lions aren’t known for reacting to catnip like housecats, curiosity and the strong scent could have triggered its playful behavior. When asked about the situation, the store owner just smirked: “Colorado’s known for its plants making folks feel good, guess now we know the animals are into it too.”
However, a Google search for “Colorado mountain lion store catnip” found no news outlets reporting about a mountain lion breaking into a pet store in Colorado Springs, let alone playing with catnip. Prominent news outlets would have widely reported this rumor, if true.
Although Sightengine, a tool for detecting artificial intelligence (AI)-generated images, did not flag the image shared in the posts as AI, other elements made it suspicious. (It’s worth noting that AI image detectors are not always accurate.)
For example, in the image, the mountain lion appeared to be in a grocery store snack aisle rather than a cat toy aisle at a pet store, as described in the story. A TinEye search of the image led to a viral video (archived) of a robbery taking place in a Canadian convenience store, featuring a shot of an aisle that looked similar to one in the image.
When directly compared, the perspective and contents of both images appeared nearly identical, down to having the same snacks in the exact same spots. It appeared that an unknown individual may have edited the original image (or another one from the convenience store) to include the mountain lion, then cropped it to remove any visible watermarks, resulting in the image associated with the rumor.
The below collage shows a comparison of the aisle as it appeared in the video (on the left) and the image that circulated with the posts about the mountain lion.
(Facebook page StoryTime/YouTube channel ITV News)
The timestamp on the image was equally suspicious, displaying May 4, 2022, but there was no evidence that the image appeared online until the StoryTime page’s Sept. 15, 2025 post, the earliest example we found. If this event occurred in 2022, it would have been widely publicized at that time rather than being reported on for the first time three years later.
Rather, the person or people who authored the story seemingly fabricated the whole thing as one of countless amusing tales depicting wild animals in uncharacteristic, unexpected situations that circulate online.
Many of these stories can be characterized as “AI slop,” low-quality, AI-generated content designed to encourage clicks and shares. Unusual or surprising stories involving wild animals are one common type of slop. The individuals who generate and spread these stories aim to earn advertising revenue on websites linked from the aforementioned Facebook posts.
Although there was no evidence of a direct connection, the Facebook pages and the blog with the longer version of the story both matched patterns we identified in a story investigating a rash of AI slop stories about the alleged charitable actions of celebrities in the wake of the deadly July 2025 floods in Texas. For example, although the mountain lion story was about the U.S., one of the pages that posted it was traced back to Tbilisi, Georgia. Meanwhile, the blog featured examples of writing in Vietnamese, but the website registrant’s address traced back to a shopping plaza in Phoenix, Arizona. A Google search for the address brought up a number of similar sites, as well as scam warnings from internet users, suggesting the sites’ owners likely used this address to hide their actual location.
This is not the first time Snopes has investigated a claim popularized by the StoryTime page. For further reading, Snopes previously investigated a claim from the same page about an “AI robot” being afraid of a lion and found it to be false.
Sources:
Izzo, Jack. “Snopestionary: AI Slop, Explained.” Snopes, 22 Aug. 2025, https://www.snopes.com//articles/470975/ai-slop-media-literacy/.
Shan, Cindy. “Fake Stories about Texas Floods Reached Millions on Facebook. Foreign Ad Companies Likely Profited.” Snopes, 29 Aug. 2025, https://www.snopes.com//news/2025/08/29/facebook-ai-posts-texas-floods/.
Winter, Emery. “Did AI Robot Suffer PTSD after It Was Scared by Lion?” Snopes, 8 Sep. 2025, https://www.snopes.com//fact-check/ai-robot-lion-ptsd/.
