Author: Elizabeth Bennett

By Paige Munson, Science and Policy Coordinator

Sharing a home with mountain lions

Colin Croft is a lifelong Nebraskan, naturalist, wildlife watcher, and teacher of ethics and philosophy at his community college. Ten years ago, he realized he was sharing his property with mountain lions. In 2014, Colin placed camera traps near his home in the Wildcat Hills. He was familiar with the wildlife in his area but was shocked to find images of a mountain lion on the camera. He kept his trail cameras active and continued to discover more about the hidden life of his community lions that live on what’s considered the eastern range of breeding lion populations in the United States.

Colin was thrilled to discover an animal that, most people assumed, no longer existed in Nebraska. His curiosity about the carnivore he’d seen on his camera prompted him to learn more about the cat, and inadvertently, about wildlife management in a state not known for lions.

Mountain lion management and the need for wildlife agency reform

“Mountain lions, to me, really opened up the world of wildlife management, “ said Colin. “When I was a young guy, I did a little bit of hunting, and a lot more fishing. I was familiar with our state parks and our state agency, but I never really thought about their role and what they did. It was through mountain lions that I understood the agency’s view on wildlife. I had never questioned it before. But there is this notion that the agency needs to focus on consumptive users, mainly the hook and bullet crowd, but also park users. But if you’re wanting to enjoy wild places and be a wildlife watcher, you’re excluded. I never really recognized that.”

Colin also learned more about the historical attitudes of wildlife agencies towards carnivores. The last of the state’s mountain lions were mostly eradicated by the late 1800s. Part of this eradication was due to the overhunting of prey species but also to systematic bounties placed on carnivores with the goal of wiping them out. Colin says, “We’ve made a lot of ethical progress…and I believe there is hope for change. The history of how we view mountain lions and other species is proof of our change in perspective. We don’t need to look back very far to see that these were unwanted animals to most. I think mountain lions are kind of emblematic of our movement away from that.”

The first modern case of mountain lions returning to Nebraska was confirmed in 1991 in the Pine Ridge, an escarpment (steep slope) in the northwestern part of the state. In 1995, after a female mountain lion was shot and killed the legislature voted to list mountain lions as game animals. This status offers regulation to their hunting but can’t protect them from hunting itself. Nebraska Game and Parks has launched extensive radio-collaring programs and research, but most of this hasn’t been shared with the public nor submitted for peer review.

In 2014, the agency decided there were enough mountain lions to have a hunt, but the season has been canceled and reinstated more than once as the population numbers rise and fall. The agency’s latest population estimate for the Pine Ridge in 2021 was 33 mountain lions. No estimates have been determined for the Niobrara Valley or Wildcat Hills populations.

At Nebraska Game and Parks, the return of mountain lions to the state was seen as a success. However, “success” in this case only prompted the Agency to set population reduction goals after citing several complaints from landowners.

This logic didn’t make sense to Colin. He learned that mountain lions don’t overpopulate, making hunting unnecessary. He also learned that hunting won’t prevent conflict with humans. “It’s like trying to reduce crime by randomly imprisoning people.” Hunting doesn’t select for “problem” animals, so it is unlikely to solve for anything. Colin wants to see conflict with mountain lions dealt with on an individual level, with each case being treated uniquely, not a blanket assault on the species.

In addition to the Pine Ridge hunt, the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission voted to approve hunting in the Niobrara Valley in 2023. In June of 2024 the Commission will be voting on whether to hunt mountain lions in Colin’s home, the Wildcat Hills.

Colin acknowledges that things could be a lot worse in Nebraska. “Some people don’t want any mountain lions in Nebraska, or an open season on them. The agency seems to be trying to find a middle ground.”

The case for more research by wildlife agencies

People like Colin who live on the eastern range of lion populations rely on information from states where there’s been more investment into learning about cougars. Colin says, “We rely on research from western states. When we’re thinking about Midwestern states [John] Laundre said we should really be calling them river lions. He makes the point that waterways are their transportation and infrastructure. If you have steeper elevations like in the western states, water goes from point A to point B pretty quickly. Since Nebraska is so flat, we have a lot of meandering waterways. It would really be valuable to have more research in Nebraska to see if mountain lions behave and recolonize differently than in western states. But whatever research we have going on here is done by [Nebraska Game and Parks] for its own purposes. The only time Nebraskans see the research is when it’s used to justify adding another mountain lion hunting season.”

Despite his frustrations with the lack of research investment by his wildlife agency, Colin still finds good in the department, including its support of the Master Naturalist program and their outreach efforts to educate more people about wildlife. Nebraska Game and Parks also puts efforts towards projects like the Nebraska Legacy Project that focuses on conservation. Colin has become a major voice advocating for reform at Nebraska Game and Parks through letters, hearings, petitions, and collaborative projects.

Outside of his work advocating for mountain lions in the Nebraska Game and Parks, Colin is an ambassador for the cougars in his own community. He hosts a Facebook page called “Nebraskans Living with Mountain Lions” to get people excited about the cats, shares his mountain lion images on iNaturalist for citizen science, and posts his mountain lion videos on his YouTube channel. He hopes sharing glimpses into the lives of lions will help people care about them as much as he does, and maybe to speak up for them too.

Sometimes small steps are enormously important. On May 23, Texas put two very modest protections in place for the state’s mountain lion population. Though modest, wildlife advocates nationwide celebrated that decision because it marked the first time that Texas has created rules to protect their native lions – ever.

These two new rules, both of which are now in place and enforceable, are common-sense laws that help prevent excessive cruelty to wild mountain lions. The first bans “canned hunts,” which is when an individual wild lion is captured and then later released under controlled conditions so that a trophy hunter can more easily shoot it. The second new rule mandates that traps for mountain lions be checked at least every 36 hours, which in most cases prevents those lions from slowly and painfully dying of dehydration or starvation. The trapped lions are usually still killed, but at least their deaths are likely less horrific.

Mountain lions are still legally considered “vermin” in Texas, and before now, lions in Texas had no legal protections whatsoever. All other states with lions in them have at least some minimal protections for their mountain lions. So, while these steps in Texas are small ones, they represent a significant change in Texas policy, and they may open the door to additional protections by the Texas Parks & Wildlife Commission down the road.

While the Mountain Lion Foundation played a small, supporting role in getting these new regulations passed, the lion’s share of the credit goes to Texans for Mountain Lions. This grassroots coalition includes Texas-based landowners, conservation experts, wildlife advocates, and mountain lion scientists. Over the last few years, this coalition has responded to reports of excessive lion killing in Texas and successfully advocated for the Texas Parks & Wildlife Commission to take these important animals more seriously. To their credit, the Commission created a stakeholder group to study the issues, and these two new rules came to fruition in large part because they were recommended by that stakeholder group.

Another recommendation was to require “harvest reporting” in Texas, meaning that any mountain lions killed by hunters, animal control officers, or trappers would have to be reported to the state’s wildlife agency, Texas Parks & Wildlife. Without data like these, it’s hard to know how many lions are being killed in Texas, so mandatory reporting is an important step toward more robust and proactive lion management. At their most recent meeting, the Commission voiced support for this, so we are hopeful that mandatory reporting will be put in place in Texas in the near future.

The Mountain Lion Foundation thanks Texans for Mountain Lions, the Texas Parks & Wildlife Commission, and our Texas-based members and supporters for their vocal backing of these new and historic mountain lion protections in Texas – these two new rules are a small but important step in the right direction!

Wildlife agencies, mountain lion hunters, and conservationists make a lot of claims about mountain lion hunting. Ultimately, their claims are a lot wrong (but also a little right). The United States has a long history of hunting mountain lions. Before 1950, rapid and dramatic changes to land use, overhunting of prey, and bounty hunts for mountain lions led to the extirpation of cougars from much of the US. Mountain lions have recovered in some of these areas thanks to protections for both them and their prey species. However, in many western states, mountain lions are classified as a game animal that can be hunted for sport.

Here are common claims made by wildlife agencies, lion hunters, and conservationists about the necessity of hunting mountain lions:

1. Mountain lion populations need to be reduced or controlled—through hunting—to prevent mountain lions from damaging the deer or elk population.
2. Mountain lion populations can be easily reduced or controlled through recreational hunting.
3. Mountain lion hunting will reduce conflicts with livestock, pets, and people.
4. Mountain lion hunting will improve the social acceptance of living with mountain lions.

The bases for these claims are varied, and include anecdotal evidence, some scientific evidence, intuition, and a sense of “justice.”

Claim 1: Mountain lion populations need to be reduced or controlled—through hunting—to prevent mountain lions from damaging the deer or elk population.

Scientific research and published peer-reviewed studies about the ecology of mountain lions do not support this claim. The first falsehood is the assumption that mountain lions will overpopulate or need control to begin with. The size of a mountain lion population is limited by food and territorial behavior. Based on these factors, a given area will have a carrying capacity of mountain lions that it can support; the lion population won’t rise above this capacity. Animal populations generally follow this type of population growth, with slower-breeding species (“k-selected” in biology terminology) reaching carrying capacity more gradually.

The carrying capacity of the environment can change for mountain lions if the environment changes, but ultimately overpopulation will not occur because of conflicts between lions and because they can move away from areas with too little food.

For some people, a stable population of lions on a landscape still feels like “too many,” leading to calls for population reductions. Not only is it difficult to reduce mountain lion populations through anything less than drastic levels of hunting (see Claim 2 below) but removing lions can reduce community safety as well (see Claim 3 below). Further, research tells us that lions have tremendous value to local food webs and ecosystems, so reducing lion populations through aggressive hunting damages those ecosystems.

Claim 2: Mountain lion populations can be easily reduced or controlled through recreational hunting.

This claim is complicated. Mountain lion populations do not need to be hunted to control their population, and hunting will only reduce their numbers if enormous numbers are killed (i.e., if the entire population is nearly extirpated).

Hunted mountain lion populations often exhibit source-sink dynamics. When young mountain lions leave their mother’s territories to find their own, males and females disperse, with males often traveling a hundred miles or more to find new homes. A heavily hunted lion population (or one in which more lions die from other causes than are born there) is called a sink. Males from less hunted populations are a source because they fill recently vacated territory in a nearby sink population. Source-sink dynamics account for why a heavily hunted population may never actually have fewer mountain lions.

In most areas of the American West, there is usually a source available to provide for sinks. Game reserves, nearby states with lighter levels of hunting, and areas of the landscape that are difficult for hunters to access are common factors that create a source population within dispersal distance of a sink. Significant disruptions to the mountain lion population can happen in a sink population even while immigration maintains levels at the carrying capacity, and in some cases that disruption increases the local mountain lion population.

Of course it is possible to eradicate mountain lions. Florida is now the only state east of the Mississippi River that has a breeding population of cougars (i.e., the Florida panther). However, cougars weren’t extirpated from the eastern US because of sport hunting. They were eradicated because their prey (e.g. deer and elk) were overhunted, their habitat was dramatically altered/reduced, and governments put bounties on their heads. In the western US, states with hunting programs that aim to control or reduce mountain lion populations are unnecessary and ineffective for their intended outcome.

Claim 3: Mountain lion hunting will reduce conflicts with livestock, pets, and people.

A great deal of research has gone into exploring whether killing carnivores reduces the likelihood of conflict with people, with mixed results. While more robust studies are needed in this area, recent analyses of the existing research concluded that killing carnivores doesn’t reduce conflict — and in fact may make it worse, leading to decreased safety for livestock, pets, and people.

Source-sink dynamics explain this conclusion. Killing a mountain lion doesn’t mean that there is one less lion with which to have conflict. It simply means there is an empty territory for other, younger and less experienced mountain lions to fill.

Non-lethal methods to protect livestock and pets (such as night-penning, fences, livestock guardian dogs, and motion sensor lights) will likely provide better chances of long-term success because these methods do not rely on the unrealistic absence of mountain lions. Learn more about coexisting with mountain lions here.

In terms of human safety, mountain lion attacks are an incredibly rare event. You have a greater chance of being struck by lightning than attacked by a cougar. Research on the subject is admittedly slim, due to a thankfully tiny sample size. Read more about the risk of mountain lion attacks here.

If mountain lions exist in the wild, there will always be a real, though minuscule, risk of attack. The recreational hunting of mountain lions won’t change that, unless every lion is eradicated. A world without wild animals, including carnivores like mountain lions, would be an ecological catastrophe.

Claim 4: Mountain lion hunting will improve the social acceptance of living with mountain lions.

This is a frequent claim made in regions where people are struggling to coexist with mountain lions, either due to livestock losses or fear of them as predators. Increased mountain lion hunting is often offered as a salve for these issues, even if it won’t actually fix the problem. Hunting won’t reduce conflict, and it usually won’t successfully reduce the population. Hunting is offered not to fix the problem but to make people feel better, or for retribution after livestock is lost.

Regardless, hunting won’t solve these problems. But knowing more about these cats and learning to live with them peacefully might. To learn more about mountain lion biology and behavior, check out the Mountain Lion Foundation’s new resource: Essential Guide to Recent Scientific Research on Mountain Lions.

References

Cooley, Hilary S, Robert B Wielgus, Gary M Koehler, Hugh S Robinson, and Benjamin T Maletzke. 2009. “Does Hunting Regulate Cougar Populations? A Test of the Compensatory Mortality Hypothesis.” Ecology 90 (10): 2913–21. Dellinger, Justin A, Daniel K Macon, Jaime L Rudd, Deana L Clifford, and Steven G Torres. 2021. “Temporal Trends and Drivers of Mountain Lion Depredation in California, USA.” Human Wildlife Interactions 15 (1). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.26077/c5bb-de20

Elbroch, L. Mark, and Adrian Treves. 2023. “Why Might Removing Carnivores Maintain or Increase Risks for Domestic Animals?” Biological Conservation 283 (July): 110106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2023.110106.

Hawley, Jason E., Paul W. Rego, Adrian P. Wydeven, Michael K. Schwartz, Tabitha C. Viner, Roland Kays, Kristine L. Pilgrim, and Jonathan A. Jenks. 2016. “Long-Distance Dispersal of a Subadult Male Cougar from South Dakota to Connecticut Documented with DNA Evidence.” Journal of Mammalogy 97 (5): 1435–40. https://doi.org/10.1093/jmammal/gyw088.

Huffmeyer, Audra A., Jeff A. Sikich, T. Winston Vickers, Seth P.D. Riley, and Robert K. Wayne. 2022. “First Reproductive Signs of Inbreeding Depression in Southern California Male Mountain Lions (Puma Concolor).” Theriogenology 177 (January): 157–64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.theriogenology.2021.10.016.

Larue, Michelle A., Clayton K. Nielsen, and Brent S. Pease. 2019. “Increases in Midwestern Cougars despite Harvest in a Source Population.” The Journal of Wildlife Management 83 (6): 1306–13. https://doi.org/10.1002/jwmg.21693.

Laundré, John W., and Christopher Papouchis. 2020. “The Elephant in the Room: What Can We Learn from California Regarding the Use of Sport Hunting of Pumas (Puma Concolor) as a Management Tool?” PLoS ONE 15 (2). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0224638. 20

Lennox, Robert J., Austin J. Gallagher, Euan G. Ritchie, and Steven J. Cooke. 2018. “Evaluating the Efficacy of Predator Removal in a Conflict Prone World.” Biological Conservation 224 (August): 277–89. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.BIOCON.2018.05.003.

Logan, Kenneth A. 2019. “Puma Population Limitation and Regulation: What Matters in Puma Management?” Journal of Wildlife Management 83 (8): 1652–66. https://doi.org/10.1002/jwmg.21753

Robinson, H. S., Wielgus, R. B., Cooley, H. S., and Cooley, S. W. (2008). Sink populations in carnivore management: Cougar demography and immigration in a hunted population. Ecological Applications, 18(4), 1028– 1037. https://doi.org/10.1890/07-0352.1

Teichman, Kristine J., Bogdan Cristescu, and Chris T. Darimont. 2016. “Hunting as a Management Tool? Cougar-Human Conflict Is Positively Related to Trophy Hunting.” BMC Ecology 16 (1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12898-016-0098-4

Livestock Guardian Dogs are a new addition to ranching culture in the United States. Only since the 1970s have dogs been implemented at scale on homesteads and ranches to protect livestock.  However, these canines’ place as a cultural staple of coexistence around the world stretches back thousands of years.

Humans’ relationship with livestock guardian dogs is special, and represents one of the most effective coexistence strategies across the globe. From Patagonia to Botswana, farmers and ranchers benefit from working with these ancient pastoral partners.

Just like most people will never see a wild mountain lion in person, most people won’t work with these unique dogs either. But it’s increasingly important that all of us understand more about them. As planned grazing operations move closer to urban areas, such as goats clearing brush in fire prone freeway margins in California, more of us will experience the moment of cognitive dissonance that comes when a member of the flock suddenly starts to bark!

A few things you (probably) didn’t know about Livestock Guardian Dogs:

By Samantha Miller, Campaign Manager, Cats Aren’t Trophies

Greetings from the frontlines of the CATs campaign in Colorado! I am thrilled to provide an update on Initiative 91, the ballot initiative to ban trophy hunting and trapping of Colorado’s mountain lions, bobcats, and lynx. I would also like to introduce myself as the CATs campaign manager to the Mountain Lion Foundation membership.

Prior to joining CATs, I advocated alongside Mountain Lion Foundation in my role as the executive director of Washington Wildlife First. During that time, we achieved significant victories for wildlife in Washington state, such as the prohibition of spring bear hunting and the advancement of a legislative proviso for agency reform at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

I know the excellent work in Washington is still underway, and I was honored to be asked to return home to Colorado to lead this once-in-a-generation ballot initiative for the Center for Humane Economy and Animal Wellness Action.

I have been a lifelong carnivore advocate and worked across the eleven Western states on carnivore coexistence policies. Right now, Colorado has the unique opportunity to lead the nation in biodiversity restoration and wildlife coexistence policies. Initiative 91 is central to this opportunity.

Indiscriminate sport hunting of mountain lions and bobcats damages ecosystems and increases conflicts with people and livestock. Colorado is ground zero for chronic wasting disease and research has shown that mountain lions self-select to prey on deer and elk carrying the disease before they show symptoms, while not catching or transmitting the disease. Cats keep herds healthy!

As CATs charges into February with Initiative 91, we mark a crucial campaign milestone: We are now on the clock to gather 124,238 verifiable signatures from registered Colorado voters by July 4^th. We must meet this minimum to qualify for the November 2024 state ballot. This means we need not just to meet the state minimum but to surpass it and collect 170,000 signatures, accounting for potential signature invalidations.

CATs is printing petitions, conducting training sessions, and hitting the ground to collect signatures the first week of February. But we cannot qualify for the 2024 state ballot without your help. Please register as a volunteer signature gatherer, called a “circulator,” to receive a petition packet, training notices, event updates, and recorded sessions. Any United States citizen aged 18 and over can collect signatures in Colorado, even if you’re not a Colorado resident.

Together, we have the power to protect mountain lions, bobcats, and lynx from the brutality of trophy hunting and trapping, and champion healthy, thriving ecosystems in Colorado!

Volunteer to gather signatures for Colorado’s cats!