After a decade of writing about Alberta’s cougar overpopulation problems, I know we’re really in trouble when the lead story for April 6 in the Calgary Herald is headlined “Cougar encounters on the rise across Alberta … even in cities,” and the lead editorial the next day is titled Wildlife warnings.
Could it be that the city slickers are getting a hint of what country folk have been putting up with for at least two decades, even though they blame the ruralites for feeding the big cats?
Perhaps not, because the news story starts by swallowing, straight up, the distilled government line that in 2012 there were an “estimated 2,050 cougars across Alberta, up from about 680 20 years earlier.” This pure guess comes from page 30 of the government’s November 2012 cougar management plan. Then there is another pure government guess from the current Travel Alberta website: “It is estimated there are only 600 mountain lions left in Alberta.” If only, but then this website also says “we have had rare cougar attacks in Alberta, including a cross-country skier killed near Edmonton by a cougar.” In fact, Frances Frost was killed in 2001 in Banff National Park, but why scare tourists with the horrible truth? Effective wildlife management demands, among other things, accurate population counts of the species being managed, and knowledge of its habits and habitats. But, as Paula Wild writes in her authoritative 2013 book, The Cougar: Beautiful, Wild and Dangerous, “The truth is no one even knows how many cougars live in any state or province. Cougars are stealthy, quiet, superb ‘hiders,’ thus difficult to count.”
Wild notes that the North American increase in cougar populations started with the suddenly trendy management “tool” of changing the status of the big cats from varmints, which could be shot on sight, to big game animals and imposing draconian protective regulations, seasons, and quotas.
In 1971, Alberta, for example, made that egregious management error when nobody even knew how many cougars we already had, although the longtime government “guesstimate” was 800. Now, in Alberta, biologists love to “study” the more numerous big cats but, still, nobody really knows how many cougars we have other than that completely unsupported, unquestioned government guess of 2,050.
Touchingly, the Herald’s general cougar notes include this: “The father plays no role in raising the kittens.” On the contrary, the toms play a crucial role in population control by killing and eating kittens, sometimes even “moms.” Cougar hunting everywhere focuses on taking the treed and biggest trophy toms, so that population control is lost everywhere and cougar numbers have increased greatly in every jurisdiction where the change in status of the cougar and overprotective regulations have been instituted.
Plainly put, the sole reason for so many human-cougar encounters in Alberta is that we now have far too many cougars. Fifty years ago, when I was spending parts of upwards of 100 days in cougar country, it was unusual ever to see a cougar or even a cougar track.
By 1980, I had seen only one cougar in the wild and knew many big game guides and outfitters who had never seen one.
Since the status change, tracks are everywhere, and my cougar sightings have increased seven-fold. Does that mean we now have seven times the old-time number of 800, or 5,600 cougars in Alberta?
What is needed is a reversal of the formerly faddish management error that has caused the overpopulation of cougars everywhere in western North America. The designation of the cougar as a big game species must be revoked and its former status as a fur bearing carnivore, maybe even a “varmint,” restored. That way, cougar manners, maybe even their numbers, might be improved by being shot at, on sight, by anyone, any time.
That is starting to happen in other cougar-infested jurisdictions. The New Mexico legislature, for example, is currently considering a bill that would effectively treat the state’s mountain lions as nuisance animals. This legislation would overturn a regulation that currently protects females with cubs from being hunted, as well as removing the requirement of a hunting licence in order to harvest a mountain lion.
This would mean open season on mountain lions in New Mexico; they could be hunted or trapped at any time without harvest limits. Wildlife officials estimate there are between 3,000 to 4,500 mountain lions in New Mexico. Sounds about right to me: New Mexico is half the size of Alberta; does that give us another “guesstimate” of 6,000 to 9,000 cougars in Alberta?
We’ll never get an exact population number anywhere for any large, secretive carnivore, but when people are plainly encountering too many, it is time to put the cougar count down for the count.
Bob Scammell is an award-winning columnist who lives in Red Deer. He can be reached at bscam@telusplanet.net.