By The Canadian Press

Fact File: Canadian store’s security photo manipulated to show mountain lion break-in

Jan 13, 2026 | 2:42 PM

Social media posts this month claimed a mountain lion played with toys and got high on catnip after breaking into a Colorado pet store. In fact, the shop pictured in the post appears to be an Edmonton convenience store, which has never reported a mountain lion encounter but was the scene of a notoriously unsuccessful attempt to evade police in 2018.

THE CLAIM

“A mountain lion raids a Colorado pet store, gets high on catnip, and naps in the toy aisle,” reads the caption on a photo posted Jan. 3 to the X platform, formerly Twitter, with around 37,000 likes and 361,000 views.

The accompanying photo seems to show a mountain lion standing in a store aisle lined with colourful products. An inset image shows the lion curled up in a ball with something next to its mouth.

A page that posted the photo to Facebook this month claimed it showed security camera video from a Colorado Springs, Colo., pet store.

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“The lion ripped open a bag, rolled in the shavings, and soon appeared blissfully intoxicated. When employees arrived, they found the massive animal sprawled out in the toy aisle,” the Facebook post with 128,000 likes reads.

The page credits “Colorado Springs wildlife reports” as its source.

On YouTube, a video that has drawn more than 687,000 views since it was posted on Jan. 4 shared the same claim about the mountain lion break-in and said wildlife officers relocated the animal “back to its natural habitat.”

THE FACTS

A keyword search on Google shows no media reports related to a mountain lion breaking into a pet store in Colorado Springs or elsewhere.

However, it does lead to what appears to be the earliest version of the rumour, posted Sept. 15 on the “StoryTime” Facebook page.

Many of the page’s photos contain features associated with generative AI, including blurriness, misplaced limbs and the inability to generate legible text.

The fact-checking website Snopes found the page shared a photo likely generated with artificial intelligence and posted a fabricated story about chimpanzees domesticating penguins.

The StoryTime mountain lion image includes the date 05-04-2022 in a font and format that suggests it’s meant to represent a security camera’s time-stamp, but there are no media reports about the mountain lion story from 2022, and the first instance of the image appearing online seems to be in 2025.

A reverse image search on TinEye led to a viral video of a woman falling through the ceiling of an Edmonton convenience store during a 2018 police intervention.

The security camera video includes a shot of an aisle that looks nearly identical to the aisle from the mountain lion story.

The raised platform and stool at the end of the aisle, as well as the shape, colour and order of packages on the shelf are almost exactly the same. The perspective of both images is also the same, but the image containing the mountain lion is blurrier and more closely cropped.

While the mountain lion story appears fabricated, those searching for information about it on Google might be led to think otherwise, depending on the words they use.

Searching “mountain lion breaks into store” on Google leads its AI overview to claim “mountain lions have broken into stores, most famously a Colorado Springs pet store where one got high on catnip.” The AI overview links to the fabricated posts as its source.

However, searching “mountain lion catnip pet store” leads to an AI summary that correctly notes the story is false.

AI overviews are meant to show information provided by high-quality sources from the web, but they can run into problems if that information isn’t available, a Google spokesperson told The Canadian Press in September, in response to an inquiry about misleading overviews related to Canadian hockey stars.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 13, 2026.

Marissa Birnie, The Canadian Press