Montana Surveys Views About Lions State Polls Hunters, Ranchers On Cougars

Do you want mountain lions near your home?

Should money from selling hunting licenses be used to pay ranchers who lose livestock to cougars?

These are just two of the questions about mountain lions which are in a survey mailed by the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

With high numbers of lions and increased resistance to hunting them, the wildlife agency decided to spend $8,000 on the study.

The agency mailed 2,660 surveys - 1,500 at random, 1,000 to hunters, 100 to sheep and cattle ranchers and 60 to people who had reported problems with cougars.

This will give the agency views ranging from people who say lions are a risk to their personal safety or livestock, to animal-rights activists who want to ban hunting cougars.

About 70 percent of the surveys have been returned and the agency is ready to start tabulating, said John McCarthy, its special projects coordinator.

“We want to put all of this into a ball and say, ‘There’s the state’s attitude toward mountain lions,”’ McCarthy said.

No one knows how many lions there are in Montana. It’s safe to say the population has increased dramatically since the 1970s but may have peaked in the early 1990s, said Keith Aune, who supervises the wildlife agency’s research laboratory in Bozeman.

McCarthy said that protests against lion hunting have made it more difficult to manage the large cougar population in the Pacific Northwest.

“Our ability to manage these animals is dwindling,” McCarthy said. “We’re looking for what people think of lions. How do they fit into the realm of things?” McCarthy said.

California banned lion hunting in 1990, but as their numbers have increased attempts have been made to overturn the ban. Last year, Washington state banned hunting cougars and bobcats with bait or dogs, while Oregon defeated a similar measure.

Idaho and Utah have reported more lion problems, and last year a cougar was captured in Salt Lake City two blocks from the governor’s mansion. Idaho is going to allow more lions to be killed in the southeastern part of the state, to appease deer hunters, ranchers and rural residents.

There have been more problems in Montana with mountain lions since the 1970s, rising to 27 incidents between people and lions recorded by Aune in 1991. In 1989, a cougar killed a 4-year-old boy near Evaro, northwest of Missoula.

But by 1995, the number of incidents between lions and people had dropped to 13.

An abundance of prey in western Montana, where most of the confrontations with people occur, has led to the decline, Aune said. “In western Montana, the whitetail deer had been doing quite well - until this winter.”

Another reason confrontations have declined is that the state raised lion hunting quotas in much of western Montana, McCarthy said. In 1996-97, 563 lions were killed in the state, compared to 159 in 1988-89. Wildlife officials are also being more aggressive in dealing with lions in residential areas.

Most problems with lions are in Montana’s central livestock ranges and the western valleys. In fact, the number of cougar-livestock incidents recorded by the wildlife agency increased each year from 1992-95, as the declining mule deer population in central Montana forced some lions to start killing livestock.

Most of the problem lions are young cougars who have just separated from their mothers and “are just having trouble making a living,” McCarthy said. A lion needs to kill the equivalent of one deer every 10 to 14 days.