Vern Evans
On a chilly October day in Denver, a crowd of Colorado sportsmen and -women gathered on the Capitol steps to rally against a proposed mountain lion and bobcat hunting ban. Amid the sea of camo, blue jeans, and blaze orange, I stood next to two lion hounds, Nose and Rosie, and their owners, who’d driven there from Craig that morning. The two old dogs whined softly at my feet as a big, bearded trapper named Dan Gates addressed the crowd through the microphone.
“When you lose it, ladies and gentlemen, you don’t get it back,” boomed Gates, the executive director of Coloradans for Responsible Wildlife Management.
And if I wasn’t paying attention, I would’ve thought Gates was just talking about big cat hunting in Colorado, which was put on the chopping block this year through a citizen-led ballot initiative spearheaded by an animal rights group, Cats Aren’t Trophies. If it passes by a simple majority in November, the measure would ban all hunting and trapping of mountain lions and bobcats in Colorado. The ban’s supporters say these activities are ugly, inhumane, and bad for wildlife. But because they were unable to convince state wildlife commissioners or the legislature of their opinions, they are now relying on the non-hunting general public to weigh in on predator hunting, which is one of the most nuanced facets of modern wildlife management.
The public should not be mistaken, however. It was those three words — modern wildlife management — that Gates was referring to when he mentioned losing it.
Because on the other side of Rosie and Nose stood a German shorthaired pointer and a bird hunter, neither of whom had chased a cougar a day in their lives. Next to them was a fly shop owner, and the more I looked the more I saw: Ducks Unlimited caps, Public Land Owner hoodies, and a lone New Yorker who’s never bought a Colorado hunting license and likely never will.
All these disparate sportsmen and -women found themselves rubbing shoulders on Oct. 18 because when you get down to it, Proposition 127 is about much more than cougar hunting. It’s an attempt to use big-cat hunting to turn public opinion against nearly 60 years of wildlife science and conservation success. The ballot measure does this through clever wordplay by creating a definition for “trophy hunting” that is synonymous with hunting itself — a definition that could then be used, in Colorado and elsewhere, to eliminate any other type of regulated hunting.
“Once you start defining that phrase, it sets a precedent … and then you get into a conundrum of interpretation. Is trophy hunting actually hunting? Because that’s now statute, right?” Gates says. “Those are the things we’re concerned about. And if anybody thinks their [CAT’s] intent is to do anything other than to ban all hunting, then they’re not paying attention.”
This creates a slippery slope, indeed. Since regulated hunting (or “trophy hunting” as CAT’s supporters would call it) is a core component of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. Although it flies in the face of most everything anti-hunters want to tell you, our ability to take a data-driven and science-based approach and manage our wildlife through selective harvest and consumptive use has actually allowed those species to flourish. Colorado’s mountain lions are perhaps the best example.
Up until the 1960s, mountain lions were considered a “nuisance species” in the Centennial State, with no bag limits or regulations around their harvest. It was a free-for-all, and by 1965, the state was left with a meager population of around 200 lions. That year, state wildlife managers changed the cougar’s “nuisance” status to “big game species” and began managing them just like elk and other big game. They used scientific models, population studies, and other research to create sustainable hunting seasons and harvest limits.
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Fast forward to 2024, after 59 years of regulated hunting, and Colorado’s mountain lion population is nearly 5,000 strong. We now know more about these cats than ever before, thanks in part to the houndsmen and lion hunters who pursue them. Cougar hunting remains one of the most highly regulated activities in the state, and it’s a fairly low-percentage game. The average success rate for lion hunters is around 19 percent, according to Colorado Parks and Wildlife, and out of the 2,599 cougar tags purchased last year, 2,097 went unfilled.
And yet, there is a group of people today who are trying to convince Colorado voters that hunters are hellbent on extinguishing every cub in the state. And unfortunately, the anti-hunting strategy is working. Gates says that according to the latest polling, 45 percent were for the cat hunting ban, 44 percent against it, and 12 percent undecided. This means the next few weeks will be a political boxing match as hunters and conservationists try to show the non-hunting public that regulated hunting drives ecological success. And that ballot-box biology is a poor replacement for the scientists and wildlife experts who have, for the last three generations, used hunting as a management tool to help Colorado’s most beloved wild species to thrive.
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On the other side of the ring, Prop. 127’s proponents will jab and tug at heartstrings. They’ll flaunt grip-and-grin photos of overweight Oklahomans holding up bloody felines, and post videos of hounds running cats up evergreens. Which I will admit, is not a pretty sight in the eyes of a run-of-the-mill wildlife lover living in Boulder or Fort Collins (of which there are many).
What the ban’s supporters fail (or don’t want) to understand, in my humble opinion, is that many of these same voters are able to think critically and do their own research. If they can look far enough to see that regulated cougar hunting and bobcat trapping is an ongoing conservation success story grounded in science, then modern wildlife management as we know it might survive another year in Colorado.
But if it doesn’t, we won’t get it back.
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