Quote:
Originally Posted by Moses
My dad was a rancher. So was his father. Ranchers always overestimate the impact of predation on their herds. Always.
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Yes, agreed - I'm sure they do. However, "the times they are a-changin'". Today, determining whether or not a particular animal was lost to predation has taken on a political side that I suspect your father and grandfather probably did not have to navigate.
Speaking with ranchers and land owners here in Washington, over in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, I hear a common theme. They find a calf, or a lamb, or whatever killed by predators. They contact the game department. The game department sends out an "expert" whose only job appears to determine that the animal was not killed by whatever politically charged local predator is in the limelight. Wolves seem to be the most immediately ruled out; it's reached the point that even if you shoot a wolf that is feeding on one, it's up to you to "prove" that wolf actually killed it, or risk fines or imprisonment.
Mountain lions are a bit further down the scale politically than wolves (probably not "majestic" enough...), but there is still pressure to assign kills to anything but. Coyotes are the current scapegoats. No one cares if you kill coyotes - they are not "majestic" at all. Anyway, even in this politically charged environment, they can't help but charge Mountain lions with the crime in an awful lot of cases. Witness the number of depredation permits aigel mentions above. Granted, his data covers quite a period of time, but it is indicative of the problem.
That, and like I mentioned earlier, game department agents now kill more Mountain Lions in a given year than hunters ever did, ostensibly based upon complaints received from ranchers and land owners. It is a problem, the taxpayers of California are paying their game department to take care of it, where they could have paying hunters taking care of it. Either way, the cats die. Just seems like a bass ackwards, completely emotionally driven, uninformed, and expensive approach.