I have lived in Colorado for over 60 years and began following my father elk hunting as a kindergartner. I’ve also been involved as a citizen in Colorado with wildlife and habitat issues for 40 years, have served on various groups with Colorado Parks and Wildlife, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management, and have been a student in the wildlife biology program at CSU.
Recently in The Denver Post, Dan Ashe wrote that cougars regulate Chronic Wasting Disease in an effort to build support for a ban on mountain lion hunting with Proposition 127 . This is a classic example of pseudo-science.
There is no scientific evidence to substantiate this claim, yet anti-hunters continue to misrepresent this claim as fact. Although there is evidence a predator’s digestive system kills most of the prions responsible for CWD, it doesn’t kill all of them.
Besides, cervids like deer and elk don’t eat cougar feces. Prions, a mutated protein, can survive on the ground for years, but are generally transmitted through contact with other cervids. The prions primarily reside in the brain and spinal column of the animal, which cougars generally don’t eat. Cougars, like all predators, are opportunists, they will kill the sick and the young, but also frequently kill healthy prey. There are an estimated 4,500 cougars in Colorado.
CWD is one class of prions, other examples are scrapies in sheep, mad cow disease in cattle, and Creutzfeld-Jakob disease in humans. They all have a species-specific prion that cause the disease. Collectively they are known as Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSEs). We will never know for sure, but it is believed TSEs came here with the European colonization of North America. It’s unlikely North American wildlife evolved with TSEs and unlikely predators are a natural “bulwark” in regulating the prevalence of CWD on the landscape.
Ashe attempts to establish his anti-hunting credentials by describing himself as a hunter. Go figure. As with most hunters fair chase and how I hunt is as important to me as the hunt itself. Hound hunting is not as easy as he wants the reader to believe. Raising and training hounds is a skill that requires a great deal of dedication in time and resources.
Ashe is apparently unaware that many cougars today are harvested by predator calling. The cougar is approaching the hunter doing the calling with the intention of an easy meal — fair chase indeed. Cougar hunting is more difficult than his obvious lack of experience suggests.
In the 1980’s I worked for the Colorado Department of Wildlife (now CPW) on a cougar study on the Uncompahgre Plateau. Alan Anderson was the lead researcher and one of the most well-regarded wildlife researchers in the country, and it was the largest cougar research project ever undertaken at that time. We used hounds to tree, tranquilize, take measurements and age the cougar.
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Turning out dogs in the morning on a track, navigating through multiple canyons at 8,500 ft in a foot of snow, capturing a cougar, and leading the dogs back to the truck in the dark 12 hours later, is an epic adventure and may change one’s mind about what constitutes “fair chase”, regardless if it’s research or hunting. One conclusion of the study was cougar populations were increasing. They have continued to increase over the decades. There is no paucity of cougars in Colorado.
Cougar hunting in Colorado uses a quota system based on 185 Game Management Units. The quota in each GMU is determined by the best science available. Hopefully, Ashe believes in sound science. Once the quota is reached the hunting season ends in that GMU. It is impossible to over-harvest cougars with this system.
Lastly, every game brochure published by CPW reminds hunters that game animals harvested must be “prepared for human consumption.” There are plenty of cougar hunters who would share their cougar recipes or share a cougar meal with Ashe, and as a true hunter, I’m sure he would be happy to try some excellent cougar fare.
Casey Chipman lives in Montrose.
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