Cougar Conundrum

YAKIMA -- Keith Rieff knows what a nightmare sounds like: the crunching of bones in the black of night.

He's heard it while awake.

The Klickitat County rancher has, in fact, waited long hours to hear it -- perched in a tree stand overlooking a dead ewe or lamb, awaiting the return of the cougar that killed it but couldn't quite drag the carcass past the chain-link fence that borders his property.

"It can take them up to three days to finish the body," says Rieff, who estimates that he's lost seven sheep to cougars over the past decade. "So I have to set up a little camp to wait for them to come back.

"One of the scariest things I've ever experienced is listening to the crunching of the bones. They eat it just like we eat an apple; their teeth go right into the backbone and the skull, the legs, the whole thing."

When he hears that crunching, Rieff can flick on a floodlight and try to get a shot at the cougar. With his adrenaline pumping, seeing the cougar in the light -- "the orange glow of their eyes when it reflects back," he says, "is just absolutely shocking" -- and the cougar's hasty exit, Rieff knows his chance of a good shot is fleeting. And he knows if he simply wounds the cougar, rendering it less capable of hunting wild prey, it will eventually be back for another lamb or a neighbor's pet.

"If I can't get a perfectly clean shot," he says, "I won't take it."

Rieff believes his best shot at reducing his cougar woes -- and those of other Klickitat County landowners with livestock or outdoor pets -- may come not from a gun barrel.

It might come in a boardroom.

* * * *

At its Aug. 8-9 meeting in Lynnwood, the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission will consider Klickitat County's request to be added to the state's pilot cougar hound-hunt program.

For the last four years, that program has issued a limited number of cougar permits to hound hunters in five counties -- Chelan, Okanogan, Ferry, Stevens and Pend Oreille, where cougar-human conflict numbers have traditionally been among the state's highest.

A lot of people in Klickitat County, though, believe their cougar concerns can't be that far behind.

"They've exploded, numbers-wise," says Centerville rancher Jess Kayser. "Back in the days before they outlawed the dogs" -- by public initiative in 1996 -- "I'd never even seen one. It was kind of a novelty just to see a track. Last year, I saw four within three weeks. I haven't been able to prove they've killed any of my cattle yet, but I've got my suspicions about a few."

Klickitat County Commissioner Ray Thayer has been lobbying for the county's inclusion in the pilot program since its inception in 2004, but it only became a possibility four months ago when the Legislature extended the program and also opened it to additional counties who met the state's criteria and applied.

So far, only Klickitat County has done so.

Donny Martorello, carnivore manager for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, has
personally talked with representatives of several other counties, including Columbia, Lincoln, Douglas, Wahkiakum and Lewis, and also spoke on the program expansion at last month's Washington State Association of Counties meeting.

"Most of them said 'Thanks for the info, this doesn't feel like it fits us,'" Martorello says.

Not Klickitat, though.

"These cats are just getting too 'friendly' -- they're not afraid of people," says Thayer, the county commissioner. "We've had situations where the cats are encountering people in their barns. Our cougar problems have gone up substantially. Used to be the deal was if you lived in cougar country, your chances of seeing one cougar in your lifetime is about it.

"That isn't the case down here anymore."

"Historically, cougar incidents were very low and rare in the county," says Dan Bolton, a WDFW enforcement officer based in Goldendale. "Now it seems like it's a weekly occurrence, or close to that."

* * * *

Among people who would like to see a return to hound-hunting of cougars, a popular argument is that the cougar population has been increasing steadily since the 1996 passage of Initiative 655. The proof? Well, the number of cougar-human incidents skyrocketed.

That much is true. In 1995, the year before I-655 was passed, the WDFW logged 247 confirmed cougar complaints around the state -- essentially, a sighting in which the safety of a human, pet, or livestock might have been compromised. That number rose quickly to 563 in 1997 and 927 in 1998, topping out at 936 in 2000 -- the year the Legislature authorized the creation of public safety cougar removals, including the use of hounds.

But the cougar population was, in fact, not burgeoning. Although the most effective way to hunt cougars is with hounds -- which tree the cougar, making it a far less elusive target -- multiplying the number of hunters proved to be quite lethal.

In an effort to offset the loss of hounds as a hunting tool, the WDFW expanded the cougar season (from 30 days in 1996 to 228 days by 1999), upped the annual limit from one to two cougars and lowered the price of a cougar tag.

The result: The number of hunters holding a cougar license went from 1,500 before I-655 to more than 50,000 now -- and the number of cougars harvested by Washington hunters climbed to levels that far exceed pre-1996 levels. (Except for 1995, when a record harvest of about 300 cougars led to I-655's passage.)

The upshot is that, according to a 2006 study by Washington State University's Large Carnivore Conservation Laboratory, Washington's cougar population -- estimated as anywhere from 1,900 to 4,000 -- has actually declined since I-655. WDFW biologists agree, and are reducing harvest limits (especially those involving female cougars) and dropping the annual bag limit back from one to two.

With a declining cougar population, though, how can cougar complaints still be above 1996 levels?

It's all in the way that population has declined.

* * * *

Because there are more females than males in the general cougar population, the "incidental" cougar hunter -- one who's actually hunting elk or deer but shoots a cougar because he has that dirt-cheap cougar tag -- tends to kill more females.

Hound hunters, meanwhile, tend to target males, particularly the older, larger ones -- the very alpha males that have learned to be wary of humans -- leaving vacancies for younger, less-prudent renegades.

The combination of those two factors, suggests the WSU study, has created a younger cougar population less prepared to deal with humans' presence in cougar territory. Bingo: more scary cougar encounters.

"A lot of the cougars that tend to get more into trouble with human activities are young animals dispersing into new territory," says David Anderson, a Klickitat County-based state wildlife biologist. "And I think part of the reason we've gotten more cougar reports from the public in recent years is that there's more public that have moved into these outlying areas."

But those increasing cougar reports lead to political pressure to remove the cougars -- or, in Klickitat County's case, to bring hounds back into the hunt. And groups with concerns about the pilot hound-hunt program, like Bellingham-based Conservation Northwest, disagree with that approach.

"Any hound-hunting, or cougar hunting in general, should be based on the most current science, and not politics," says Joe Scott, the group's international conservation director.

Noting that Conservation Northwest has "absolutely no issues at all" with the state's problem-cougar removal program, Scott says, "to further couch (the pilot program) in terms of public safety, a tool set they already have, we believe is disingenuous. There's no body of evidence ... that says hound-hunting is going to prevent or preclude problem cougars."

Without the hounds, on the other hand, Klickitat County landowners can look forward to something else: long hours in a tree stand, listening for a nightmare.

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