Williams: Cougar lessons from California

With the current flap about Colorado cougar management, Coloradans might be interested in California’s cougar experience. California did everything wrong. (At least according to a large element of the wildlife management establishment.) After a series of moratoria on cougar hunting starting in 1972, the state codified the ban with the 1990 California Wildlife Protection Act.

Managers across the U.S. were aghast: California would be overrun with cougars. Loss of pets, livestock, and wild ungulates would be catastrophic.

In 1990 Dr. Walter Howard, wildlife professor emeritus at UC Davis, sounded off as follows to The Los Angeles Times: “(The cougar) is a bloody pest … Evolution has demanded that they have a regulatory mortality factor. That’s the balance of nature.” He claimed that without hunting, cougars overpopulate, exhaust natural prey, and turn to domestic animals. All incorrect.

I’m a lifelong hunter. I was also part of the wildlife management establishment in the 1970s. For a time, I believed our party line that hunting is a “necessary wildlife management tool.”

But I’ve learned that hunting is only sometimes such a tool. It certainly is for deer and elk which, in the absence of their natural predators, overpopulate and trash wildlife habitat, including their own. It certainly is not for those natural predators — cougars and wolves. Read More…