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 UCal 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 went on to claim that without hunting, cougars overpopulate, exhaust natural prey, then turn to domestic animals. All incorrect.
I’m a lifelong hunter. And I was 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.
Unlike traditional game, predators don’t compensate for mortality with fecundity. They self-regulate. They don’t require killing by humans.
After not being hunted for 52 years, have California cougars overpopulated? Not really.
In 2024, a UCal Davis study amended the statewide population estimate from 6,000 to 4,500. And the state Fish and Game Commission has ruled that a petition to protect cougars under the California Endangered Species Act in the southern and central-coast areas is warranted. A decision is pending.
What about all the predicted game depletion and depredations of livestock and pets? Immediately after The Wildlife Protection Act, there was a spike in depredation reports. But this wasn’t because there were more depredations; it was only because people were required to report them. The state’s deer population has been relatively stable for 35 years. Elk and desert bighorn sheep are increasing. Sierra Nevada bighorns were doing better until they took a hit from heavy snow in 2022.
This from Rick Hopkins who holds a doctorate in Wildlands Resource Ecology, has researched California cougars for 45 years: “For the long-term average, 100 to 120 California cougars have been killed annually via depredation permits. That’s a tiny fraction of what sport hunters kill in other states and Canada. California arguably supports more high-quality habitat than most western states (if not all) and Canadian provinces. We also support more people (nearly 40 million) than any other state. We also have more cattle and sheep than all western states and Canadian provinces, other than Texas.
“If cougar hunting were a “wildlife management tool,” one would assume that California would have substantially greater human-cougar conflicts when compared with other western states and Canadian Provinces that all support aggressive sport hunt seasons. Yet when normalized for cougar habitat in a state (a surrogate for population size), the human population (surrogate for annual recreational visitor days in cougar habitat), and livestock numbers across the western U.S. and Canada, California ranks ninth or tenth out of 15.”
While the depredation numbers haven’t changed, the state’s approach to them has. In 2020, the “Three Strikes” law required landowners whose pets or livestock are attacked by cougars to attempt non-lethal deterrence. After the third try, a landowner may request a depredation permit. Last year only 10 depredating cougars were killed.
Cougars are stable in most of California but hurting in the developed south where habitat fragmentation is causing inbreeding and vehicle traffic is causing road kills. A huge vehicle threat and barrier to cougar connectivity is Highway 101 in and near Los Angeles.
But the state is taking action. The $92 million Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing over Highway 101 (near completion) will connect protected lands in the Santa Monica Mountains and the Sierra Madre Range, thereby reducing fragmentation and roadkill.
The main takeaway from California’s cougar experience is this: Cougar hunting isn’t wildlife management; it’s hunter management. There’s not a shred of evidence that killing cougars creates more game or decreases depredations.
And there is much evidence that, because cougar hunters target large trophies, age structure is disrupted with the result that younger, inexperienced animals, particularly males, disperse to developed areas, causing increased depredations.
Ted Williams writes exclusively about fish and wildlife. He is a former information officer for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife.
