WildEarth Guardians

Friday, October 1, 2010
Game & Fish's Kill Quotas for Cougars, Disastrous

Game & Fish's Kill Quotas for Cougars, Disastrous
Contact: Wendy Keefover-Ring (505) 988-9126 x1162

SANTA FEToday, conservation and animal groups released cougar cull numbers proposed by the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, which the agency made public over the weekend. The numbers represent a radical leap in the cougar quota from 2010, and squarely target female cats. Cougars, extremely rare in New Mexico’s arid landscape, require excellent stewardship from the vicissitudes of overhunting—the main source of their mortality in all states where they are hunted.

“These hunt proposals, with their extreme prejudice against females, have the potential to bring cougar populations to the brink of extinction in New Mexico,” said Wendy Keefover-Ring, of WildEarth Guardians. “Females are not only the mothers of kittens, they are critical to the population. Females provide the resilience needed when populations are overhunted.”

The New Mexico Game Commission will make a final decision on hunting quotas for cougars and bears and a trapping ban on wolves at its hearing in Ruidoso on Thursday, October 28th. At its August 28th hearing, the New Mexico Game Commission saw attendance from over 400 members of the public, many of whom decried the proposed cougar and bear quotas. The Commission also received 1,400 emails in opposition to the quotas.

WildEarth Guardians, Animal Protection of New Mexico, and the Rio Grande Chapter of the Sierra Club vehemently reject the New Mexico Department of Game & Fish’s proposal on cougars as too drastic. The Agency seeks to jump hunting quotas by 103 percent for cougars, from 490 animals per year to 996. It jumps the quota on females from 126 to 386, a 200% increase.

Simultaneously, the Agency called for examining regulations only every four years, which will disenfranchise both the public and the Game Commission itself from the rulemaking process—leaving cougars in the hands of the agency that benefits from selling hunting tags for cougars and other animals. Most, if not all, Western states review cougar quotas annually.

“Most kittens are born in the summer—just before New Mexico’s general hunting season, which occurs from October to the end of March—this jeopardizes kittens from death after being orphaned by hunters” added Phil Carter of Animal Protection of New Mexico. “We call upon the Game Commission to make the online hunter education program mandatory,” he added, “it helps hunters to distinguish between the gender of cats so that mother cats and their dependent young are protected.”

This year, Game and Fish tossed out a seminal 10-year-long, published study on cougars of New Mexico that cost $1 million in taxpayer money. The Agency now relies on an unpublished study purportedly by a student that it could not produce to conservation groups even after they requested the document through a standard records request.

“It hasn’t been explained how the department is making assumptions on cougar populations if it doesn’t have the cited study in its possession,” says Phil Carter. “This a complete failure of accountability and transparency by a state agency.”

“Killing cougars will neither protect humans nor livestock, nor magically increase the herd size of deer or bighorn sheep,” stated Mary Katherine Ray of Sierra Club, Rio Grande Chapter.

“New Mexicans overwhelmingly support cougar conservation,” said Ray. “They are necessary in maintaining the balance of nature,” she said. “They indirectly protect rare desert streams in arid landscapes.”

View the chart affecting cougar kittens (PDF)

View the cougar quota comparison chart (PDF)