The state of Oregon is back in
the business of killing cougars. After a long and contentious
public comment process, the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission
recently approved a management plan for the state’s top predator
that would allow government-paid hunters to reduce cougar numbers
back to 1993 levels. That could ultimately mean the killing of 40
percent of the cougars in the state. Oregon’s experience is being
played out across the West, as government agencies struggle to
reconcile two irreconcilable forces: our love of cougars and our
hate of cougars.
Why do we love cougars? The reasons
aren’t hard to find. They are beautiful. Their power, grace and
skill inspire awe and admiration. As top predators, they help to
keep things in balance by controlling prey numbers and removing
vulnerable individuals.
Why do we hate cougars? The
reasons aren’t hard to find. They sometimes attack our livestock
and our pets. They compete with us, killing the deer and elk that
we enjoy killing ourselves. They can threaten vulnerable
populations of prey like bighorn sheep. They scare us, because in
California and Colorado, though never in Oregon, they have killed
human beings.
These passionate feelings have led to
political action. In 1994, the voters of Oregon approved a ballot
measure banning the hunting of cougars with hounds, and two years
later defeated an effort to overturn that ban. Advocates of cougar
hunting have never accepted these defeats, and tirelessly portray
rising cougar populations as a threat to livestock and to human
safety. Now, the issue has become polarized. As the Oregon Cougar
Management Plan notes, with considerable understatement,
“Oregonians … have shown a clear desire to be involved in cougar
management.”
You have to feel sorry for state wildlife
managers: Whatever cougar management plan they adopt is certain to
infuriate a large segment of the public. In such a situation, the
best they can do is to ground their plan firmly in science —
specifically, the ecology and population biology of cougars and
their prey. Unfortunately, although Oregon’s Cougar Management Plan
contains much data on these topics, in the end the plan is based
not on science, but on public pressure, pure and simple.
The plan’s stated goal is to manage the cougar population so that
the levels of reported “cougar-human conflicts” and
“cougar-livestock conflicts” do not exceed the levels of complaints
back in 1994. The message to anti-cougar activists could not be
clearer: The more you complain, the more cougars we will kill.
Public complaints about cougars are almost never
verified, as the plan acknowledges, but that would make no
difference in the state’s response.
Why choose 1994 as
the baseline? Good question. The answer is that 1994 was when the
ban on cougar hunting with hounds took effect — a year that
lives in infamy for the hound-hunting community. There is, however,
no scientific reason to select the cougar population in that year,
estimated at 3,100 cougars statewide, as a biologically appropriate
baseline. Besides, the human population of Oregon has increased by
more than 16 percent since 1994, and the proportion of homes being
built on the scenic edges of wild country has undoubtedly increased
even more than that. Keeping complaints at 1994 rates could
actually require reducing cougar populations far below their 1993
levels, since there are now so many more opportunities for
conflict.
Missing from the Oregon plan is any serious
attempt to hold people responsible for their choices. If you choose
to build a house deep in the forest, as many Westerners are now
doing, is it reasonable to expect the state to avenge your dog if
it is eaten by a cougar? How much freedom from risk can we
reasonably expect?
In his classic essay “Thinking Like a
Mountain,” Aldo Leopold wrote about the extermination of wolves in
the Southwest, and about the ecological disaster that followed. “We
all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and
dullness… but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the
long run.”
That danger may be the overpopulation of deer
and the degradation of forests, as happened throughout the Eastern
United States following the extermination of cougars. Or the danger
may be less tangible. It may be a loss of wildness, of an attitude
of appropriate respect for nature. As long as Oregon and other
states manage predators based on public complaints rather than
science, we will never be required to show that respect, or to
learn how to live with nature rather than against it.
Pepper Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a
biologist and writer who lives in Ashland,
Oregon.
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