Lawmakers sniff out a solution for cougar hunting

OLYMPIA, Wash. — As the state’s go-to guy on cougar research, Gary Koehler has used hound hunters to tree dozens of cougars in the Cascade foothills of western Kittitas County. And he’s not quite sure all those hounds have convinced all those cougars to put some distance between themselves and the world of people and buildings.

A cougar is treed by dogs near Cle Elum in December, 2003. The cougar was tracked, treed and eventually fitted with a radio tracking collar that day as part of a research project. (Gordon King, YHR file)

That’s why he’s not sure what to make of a pair of companion bills working their way through the Washington Legislature — Senate Bill 5356 and House Bill 1124 — that would expand and make permanent the state’s pilot program on using hounds to hunt cougars.

“Based on our research with using hounds, (cougars) certainly don’t develop a fear of people and a fear of houses through our use of the hounds,” Koehler says. “I don’t think they make that connection, with fear of humans and fear of structures.

“After a while, they know when a hound barks what that might mean. But over the eight years of study in Cle Elum, we’ve used hounds to capture and mark cats over that period and we’ve marked the same ones over and over again. Some of the cats have gotten quite clever and they’ve done what they could to elude us. But those same cats will approach residences; they haven’t moved any further away from where the people are.”

If anything, since 1996 — when Washington voters passed Initiative 655, banning the use of hounds to hunt cougars — the big cats have become even more prevalent and problematic.

Cougar-related complaints in Washington, whether for public safety, livestock or pet predation, were at just over 200 in 1995, the year before the hound-hunting ban. Those complaint numbers more than doubled in the first year after the ban and continued to climb, exceeding 900 in 2000, when the state approved the use of hounds in removing problem cougars for public safety.

Four years later, the state instituted a pilot program allowing hound-hunting of cougars in five counties in northeast Washington, where the state’s cougar populations are the highest. In 2008, Klickitat County commissioners voted to opt into the program.

Cougar complaints in the counties with hound-hunting have dropped way down, to roughly a quarter of what they were before the pilot program was initiated.

“We’ve seen about a 75 percent decrease in confirmed complaints (in counties within the pilot program),” says Donny Martorello, the state’s cougar section manager. “I can’t say it’s a cause-and-effect. It may be. It may not be.

“It’s likely more than just hunting. We’ve been more aggressive with our cougar-education outreach program, and we’ve been more aggressive with the ‘problem’ cougar when we’ve been able to get our hands on him.”

Either way, people in areas where cougars are prevalent are anxious to see that trend continue.

“Hopefully, if (the bills the state House and Senate) get passed, it will be a great thing,” says Klickitat County Commissioner Ray Thayer. “That way we won’t have to keep going back and getting (the pilot program) extended. It will be permanent.”

Thayer noted that Klickitat County’s quota of 10 cougars in the county’s current Dec. 1-March 31 season has already been filled; so have permits in the pilot-program counties in the northeast corner of the state.

“If we’re filling the quota that early,” Thayer says, “obviously there’s no shortage of cougars.”

The House Committee on Agriculture and Natural Resources heard testimony on HB 1124 on Jan. 18, while the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Marine Waters had a hearing Monday. Several Klickitat County representatives, including livestock owners who had lost cattle and sheep to cougars, were there to testify for it.

Among those testifying against it were people from Conservation Northwest.

“We’re opposing the bills because there’s still a great deal of uncertainty about the question of sport hunting,” said Joe Scott of Conservation Northwest. “These bills seems to make the connection that cougars are inherently a threat to public safety, and we don’t think that’s a wise assumption on which to base this legislation. The (WDFW) has made this connection a number of times and we think it’s invalid.

“I’m not criticizing the sponsor of the bills; I think their intentions are good. The problem we have is we’re talking about how to kill cougars before you’re talking about the why and how much.”

The “how,” though, is critical to science-based population control of cougars, says Brian Blake, one of the authors/sponsors of HB 1124.

“The underlying bill was drafted just to give Fish and Wildlife the tool back to use as they saw fit,” Blake says. “Because what we learned from the pilot project was that hound hunting was the best biological tool to manage the cougar population. You can tree a cougar, determine the sex and the general age of the cougar, and then you decide whether you’ll take it or not take it. It’s the best tool.”

Certainly, it’s less haphazard than relying on the success of “boot hunters” who have purchased a cougar/bear tag to use on the off chance they come upon a cougar while they’re out hunting for something else. WDFW statistics show that most of those opportunistic cougar kills are of young females; according to an Oregon study, though, male cougars of any age are more likely than females to be involved in behavior resulting in a complaint to wildlife enforcement officers.

Blake, though, said there had been enough “pushback” — much of it from people in the heavily populated Seattle and Tacoma areas — that the initial bills will almost certainly have to be rewritten in order to pass. Initially intended to make the pilot program permanent and make hound hunting of cougars legal on a statewide basis — with quotas to be established by the WDFW — the bills may ultimately be reduced to simple extensions of the pilot program.

“I think we know this is the best tool for the job, and at least we know the the agency deserves to have this tool in their toolbox in managing cougar populations. I don’t think that’s been refuted,” Blake says. “(But) I’m willing to scale it back a little bit and go through this process (of revising the bill’s language).”

He may have to. While a majority of respondents to a WDFW survey support using hounds to remove cougars in circumstances regarding public safety and livestock/pet depredation, fully two-thirds of those surveyed were against the use of hounds in recreational hunting of cougars.

Jeff Jones of Moxee, a hound hunter who has assisted the state in a cougar-DNA project in northeastern Washington, says he doesn’t want to see “the legislators bowing to the pressures from the anti-hunting community in this state.”

“I believe this should be a right-to-hunt state and not have our wildlife managed by people who do not believe in hunting,” Jones said. “I believe in order to have a good balance with all of our animal populations, you need to manage them through a quality hunting program and using good biological data.

“I believe the pilot hound program has been very successful.”

As long as cougars have a prey base in Washington, there will be cougars. And with so many people moving out to live in what scientists refer to as “the urban-rural interface,” there will invariably be conflicts.

When cougars are raiding livestock, that’s one thing. Sometimes, though, the blame won’t fall on the cougar.

“Cats are going to be where the deer are,” says Koehler, the WDFW cougar researcher. “And as long as we insist on feeding deers in our front yard, that’s going to be an attractant.”