FOLEY, Ala. — Get the kids and the livestock inside and bar the door. That is, if it was true that a huge male mountain lion has been prowling Baldwin County Road 32 northeast of Foley. Fact is, officials with the Alabama Department of Conservation Wildlife & Freshwater Fisheries say the information and pictures making their rounds in that regard are an Internet hoax.

According to the story, one “James Snipe” allegedly hit the 260-pound cat with his car but didn’t kill it. Animal control officers were called in to finish off the big cat.

The story line also said a local landowner had seen the mountain lion a week before dragging off a 320-pound steer.

Capt. Kenneth Blalock of the Department of Conservation said the mountain lion in the picture circulating with the bogus story was killed in Arizona a year ago. He has also seen the picture and story circulating with a West Virginia dateline, he said.

The Conservation Department’s District 5 Enforcement Office in Daphne has received “one or two” calls about the story, Blalock said. He called the story an example of the “first rule of thumb” in determining the credibility of an Internet story, namely, is the subject matter about something that strains the limits of believability.

According to Blalock, there have been no cougars documented in the wild in Alabama since the turn of the 20th century. That isn’t to say a cougar or other dangerous animal that someone had as a pet couldn’t escape into the wild, he said.

As for black bears, Blalock said those can be found from Montgomery south and Birmingham north, but noted people by and large have little to fear from bears.

Indeed, people are more likely to be bitten by their neighbor’s dog than encounter anything in Alabama woods that might bite them other than a mosquito or tick, Blalock said.

A mountain lion the size of the one depicted in the Internet picture would be a tremendous animal by any standard in the Southeast, Blalock said.

Snopes, the Internet reference source for urban legends, rumors, folklore and such, says it was true that a large mountain lion was hit by a truck and killed in Arizona “on Highway 64 in northern Arizona … in November or December 2007.”

The Snopes’ Web site said the big cat weighed 200 to 220 pounds and was 7-feet from head to tail. Mountain lions typically weigh 80 to 150 pounds, Snopes said.

“As typically happens with Internet circulated photos of killed or captured animals, the accompanying text was altered multiple times to place the mountain lion in a variety of locales, including other parts of Arizona, Kentucky, Arkansas, West Virginia, Virginia, Wisconsin, Texas, Michigan, Kansas, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina.”

To that add northeast of Foley on County Road 32.