Wood River cougar hunting approved

Unit 48 mountain lion hunting will become a reality beginning next fall.

The Idaho Fish and Game Commission voted last weekend to approve a controversial cougar hunting season in the game unit that borders the west side of Highway 75 south of Ketchum and spans the east and west sides of the highway north of Trail Creek Road.

Fish and Game spokesman Mike Todd said the season will run in the same manner that Unit 49, across Highway 75 from Unit 48 south of Ketchum, has in the past.

The season will be open from Sept. 15 through March 31 annually.

Limits on the number of cougars killed in the new hunting unit will be the same as in neighboring Units 43, 44 and 49.

When three female lions are killed in any or all of the four units, the season will end. If the female quota is not met, the season will extend to the scheduled closing date.

Females that have spotted kittens will not be available to hunters as fair game because the young need them to survive.

Hunters in any unit in search of any kind of game, including mountain lions, are prohibited from discharging weapons within 150 yards of a residence.

Todd pointed out that Fish and Game officials have been considering a lion hunt in Unit 48 for the past three years. Previously the only unit in southern Idaho that did not permit lion hunting has been this unit.

The commission’s decision was not based on the recent public outcry that followed human-lion interactions, Todd said. It was based on being consistent and offering a higher quality hunting opportunity.

"There was no reason not to open a hunt there," Todd said. "The timing was just such that a lot of the perception was that we were responding to the human-lion and pet-lion encounters."

A Ketchum man recently killed a mountain lion after it had entered his yard and killed his dog. A second lion was observed in the same neighborhood after the incident.

Residents in a Hailey neighborhood reported they had seen lion tracks and that several domestic cats had disappeared.

Todd said many Wood River Valley residents have been unaware that elk, bear and many other forms of hunting have historically been permitted in Unit 48 and Unit 49.

#

Some of the local discussion around opening a new lion hunt has centered on the experience in California where sport hunting of cougars was banned.

According to California Department of Fish and Game senior wildlife biologist Steve Torres, California set cougar hunting seasons in 1970, 1971 and part of 1972. He said before those seasons were opened, the state operated under a bounty system during which lion populations were almost eradicated.

The goal of the bounty system was to eliminate mountain lions, he said. The hunting seasons offered the lions their first form of protection in California.

Since the voter-approved moratorium on mountain lion hunting in California, which began in 1972 following the termination of the hunting seasons, depredation of livestock and human-lion interaction has increased, Torres said. California has the highest number of lion attacks on humans as well as on livestock and domestic pets in the country.

But, claims based on California’s experiences that hunting solves human safety problems may not be accurate, Torres said. He cited a lack of evidence associated with California’s limited cougar hunting seasons and the low cougar populations following the bounty system.

Californians can still kill mountain lions, however, using depredation permits that are issued for reasons of safety or depredation, but California Fish and Game does not kill lions, Torres said.

Approximately the same or slightly more lions are killed in California each year than when the state had its lion hunting seasons, Torres said. Californians are killing 90 to 120 lions a year on the depredation permits, which are issued in numbers of 200 to 300 a year.

In the three-year span of California lion-hunting seasons, a total of 118 lions were killed on hunting permits.