Bills Would Send Hounds After Cougars Lawmakers Say It’S Time To Repeal Initiative 655

FOR THE RECORD: 1-23-99; Spo. Sponsor wrong: Legislation to repeal a ban on using hounds to hunt cougars is co-sponsored by Gary Chandler, R-Moses Lake, not Bruce Chandler, R-Granger, as reported Thursday.

Cathy McMorris can’t believe how many complaints she’s heard about cougars since state voters banned the use of hounds to hunt the big cats.

“I can’t even get my hair done without someone mentioning it,” the Republican state representative from Colville said. “People are quite concerned about the dramatic increase of cougars in northeast Washington.”

McMorris is co-sponsoring a house bill to overturn Initiative 655 and again allow the use of hounds in hunting cougars.

The House Natural Resources Committee conducted an emotion-charged hearing Wednesday, packed with people on both sides of the issue. About 30 wanted to testify, but some didn’t get the chance because of the overwhelming turnout.

The hearing room was lined with Eastern Washington ranchers and farmers who support the proposal. During the hearing, one opponent of the bill referred to them as “people who want to kill.”

Legislators, Republican and Democrat alike, have introduced five bills in an effort to repeal the cougarhunting portion of I-655. Approved by 63 percent of voters in 1996, the initiative prohibits the use of hounds in hunting cougars and black bears.

Initiative supporters argue that hunting cougars and bears with hounds is cruel and unsporting. Opponents say hounds are essential to hunt cougars and worry the ban has increased the number of human run-ins with the animals.

This legislative session is the first chance to repeal parts of the initiative, something the Legislature cannot do in the first two years after voters approve such a measure.

“The voters had excellent intentions,” said Rep. Bob Sump, a Republican from Republic. “But I think we made a bad law and now we have to go back and change it.”

Sump said that before 1996, he saw only one cougar in his lifetime as a hunter and outdoorsman. Since then, he’s seen nine cats in the wild.

Sump is co-sponsor of cougar legislation in the House with McMorris; Bruce Chandler, R-Granger; Joyce Mulliken, R-Wenatchee; Bill Grant, D-Walla Walla; and Mark Schoesler, R-Ritzville.

Perhaps the most notable cougar incident was last August’s Sullivan Lake attack in which a 5-year-old girl was seriously wounded after being ambushed by a cougar near a campsite.

More recently, two cougars appeared confused when they found themselves trapped in an Olympia school playground.

Cougars don’t discriminate when they are hungry, said Sen. Pam Roach, R-Auburn, sponsor of a Senate bill that would allow hound-hunting of the cats. For cougars to live communally with us, she said, it is imperative that they have a “healthy respect of humans.” That respect, she said, comes from hunting.

Passage of I-655, she said, has helped increase the state’s cougar population to more than 2,500. Many of the young and weaker cats are being driven from prime hunting territory into suburban Washington, where household pets and livestock are easy prey.

“Once, cougars were afraid of the barking dog in your yard. Now it’s a meal,” Roach said. “They are proliferating and spilling into the neighborhoods on both sides of the mountains.”

Jack Lawford, a wildlife biologist in Olympia, doesn’t think cougars will be deterred by increased hunting.

“The concept or theory that hunting teaches them to avoid humans has no empirical support,” he said, adding that the most-hunted cats are the larger males, not the smaller cats reportedly terrorizing back yards and barnyards.

Perhaps more social animals, such as coyotes or deer, would be discouraged from human contact through hunting, Lawford said, but not the solitary cougar.

“A solitary animal dying by itself does not teach the other animals in the population” to be afraid, he said.

The Department of Fish and Wildlife says reports of cougar-human incidents have increased since I-655 passed, from 495 encounters in 1996 to 927 in 1998. Those reports include sightings, stalkings, killings of livestock and attacks on people.

Lawford said the reports may simply reflect the public’s heightened awareness of cougars.

“I do strongly feel that the public is responding to the great increase in media coverage as much as they are to the increase in actual numbers (of cougars) in this state,” he said at Wednesday’s hearing.

Steve Pozzangher, an official at the Department of Fish and Wildlife, said the cougar population has been growing since the mid-1980s, when increased logging created prime habitat for cougar prey such as deer and elk.

“We cannot determine a direct correlation between I-655 and the cougar population increase,” he said, adding that the most obvious impact of the initiative is on the department’s ability to manage the population.

“Hunting is the best option for managing the population as a whole,” Pozzangher said.

After hound-hunting was banned, the department lengthened the cougar hunting season and lowered permit prices in 1996 to help keep the population in check.

The price to cougar hunters went from $24 to $5, while the season went from between six and eight weeks to 7-1/2 months.

Without hounds, cougars elude most hunters. In 1995, the last full year before I-655 went into effect, 283 cougars were killed by licensed hunters. In 1997, 132 cats were taken.

Roach worries that the concerns of rural Washington are being overrun by the special interests in Washington’s urban corridor west of the Cascades.

“There are children being stalked by cougars,” she said. “After 100 years, have we decided to retreat from the cougar?”