Hound-hunting deal in the works
Truce? An agreement struck this week between Conservation Northwest and an Eastern Washington legislator should should lead to fewer cougars being hunted, more controls on how the big cats are taken each year, and a focus on science-based management.
OLYMPIA – These adolescent males can be trouble. They wander around, get into fights on hostile turf, bother hard-working people just trying to make a living.
The experts don’t always agree on the best way to handle these problem teens. Should we hunt them down with dogs, and shoot more of them or less?
Oh, did you think we were talking about teenage boys? No, this group of adolescent males belong to the species puma concolor, also known as cougars, whose potential for increased confrontation with humans has for years been a point of contention between advocates of hound-hunting and its opponents.
An agreement struck this week between a major environmental group and an Eastern Washington legislator could be a truce in the long-running fight over hunting cougars with dogs, and lead to better state management of the big cats that some see as an icon of the West and others see as a hazard to people and livestock.
Conservation Northwest, one of the sponsors of a 1996 initiative that banned the use of hounds to hunt cougars and several other species, announced Wednesday it was dropping its opposition to a bill that allows that type of hunting in a handful of northeastern counties.
Mitch Friedman, executive director of the environmental group, said they agree with state Rep. Joel Kretz on some changes to rules that should lead to fewer cougars being hunted, and more controls how the big cats are taken each year. They also agree to bring together researchers who have been studying the large carnivores for years, and work out some of the conflicts over interpreting their studies.
“You get pretty conflicting perspectives from most of this,” Friedman said. “It’s easy to get caught up in one perspective or another.”
Some of the sharpest conflicts were clear in debates over Senate Bill 5356, which would extend a 2004 pilot program that allows the hunting of cougars with dogs in five northeastern counties from Pend Oreille to Okanogan. It passed the Senate early this month with bipartisan support and cleared the House Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee last week, but not without strong opposition from environmental groups.
A key point of contention was whether or not increased hunting of cougars – with or without dogs – lessens or heightens the chances of the big cats attacking livestock or pets, or otherwise coming in contact with people in rural or suburban areas.
Robert Wielgus, director of Washington State University’s Large Carnivore Conservation Lab, says more than 10 years of work tracking cougars indicates that losses of livestock to cougars go up in heavily hunted areas, he said: “It’s counterintuitive, and hard for people to swallow.”
One reason could be the social structure of cougars in which an adult male establishes dominance in his territory. If that dominant male is killed, by hunting or by natural causes, younger males on the periphery move in.
“They’re younger and they don’t know what they’re doing. They haven’t established their territory, they’re wandering all over the place,” Wielgus said. That can cause them to wander into farm and ranch lands or suburbs that older males have learned to avoid.
