Colorado—A carnivore conservationist outlines the political history of America’s greatest cat, explaining why commonly held beliefs may not hold true.
At the turn of the twentieth century, conservationists distinguished between what they deemed to be “good” and “bad” animals. Prey species, like young deer, were “innocent victims” whereas predatory animals, like pumas and wolves, were considered “ravenous” and “bloodthirsty.” Important spokesmen, President Theodore Roosevelt and Dr. William T. Hornaday, director of the New York Zoological Park, telegraphed this message. It seemed neither could abide a predator. In 1901, Roosevelt held a record for killing the largest puma in Colorado until he was bested in 2001. Roosevelt’s quarry came from Lyons, Colorado. If the conservationists couldn’t tolerate a puma, just imagine the sentiments western cattlemen and sheepgrowers shared.
Surprisingly, the ethic concerning large carnivores has only changed in the last few decades. In the 1930s and 1940s, scientists like Aldo Leopold and brothers Adolph and Olaus Murie began to study carnivores and publish their accounts. Wolves and coyotes did not kill for mere sport, they killed for food, and they lived in family units. Leopold and the Brothers Murie helped to alter the discourse concerning predators, especially in the scientific community.
Ironically, during this period of biological investigation, Congress passed the Animal Damage Control Act in 1931. It required the agency then called the U.S. Biological Survey—now the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services—to “promulgate the best methods of eradication, suppression, or bringing under control” on both public and private lands a whole host of native carnivores, including pumas. The intent of this work, according to Congress, was to protect livestock and farming interests. The Animal Damage Control Act remains on the books to this day.
While the Muries and Leopold changed the biological understanding of pumas, one remarkable activist, Rosalie Edge, helped engage the public. In her firebranding pamphlets from the early 1930s, Edge condemned the U.S. Biological Survey for “inflaming hostility toward our bird and animal neighbors.” She dubbed the agency “the United States Bureau of Destruction and Extermination” and complained that the survey’s “methods” were “reckless, cruel and indiscriminate.”
In her pamphlet “The United States Bureau of Destruction and Extermination,” Edge wrote that pumas were “rapidly following the grizzly bear to extinction” because the survey not only spent “considerable sums to exterminate the mountain lion by traps, poison, and other methods” but also “inflame[d] the enmity” of pumas, which was “already too great,” by “exaggerating” the “tales” of livestock losses. Edge aligned with the American Society of Mammalogists, which in 1931 dubbed the Biological Survey “the most destructive organized agency that has ever menaced so many species of our native fauna.”
Beginning in the mid-1960s, western states ended bounties on pumas—that is, exchanging puma parts, often a scalp, for payment. At this dawn of enlightenment, during the radical 1960s and 1970s, western states finally began to regulate hunting pressures on pumas, with one notable exception—Texas. (To this day this hunters’ paradise offers pumas no protections at all; even shooting spotted kittens is not discouraged.) By this time, pumas had largely been extirpated in the United States from the area that lies east of Interstate 25.
What were the effects of the bounty period? The number of cats killed in the West during the bounty period remains contested terrain among puma biologists. One school of thought holds that western puma populations were suppressed by bounties and the U.S. Biological Survey’s 1920s and 1930s poisoning campaigns.
Others argue that actually, compared to present-day figures, few pumas were killed during the bounty period because of the lack of technology and limited access in hard-to-reach places in the unroaded and often impenetrable West. Because of poor record keeping compounded by the loss of bounty records through time, the full story will likely never be unearthed. Colorado, however, is an exception, where bounty data are excellent.
Colorado maintained a bounty on pumas from 1881 to 1965, with only a brief intermission from 1885 to 1889. Under Colorado law, puma hunters would turn in a puma scalp to the county clerk and sign an affidavit declaring the county where the animal was killed.
In spite of a $50-per-scalp incentive for bounty hunters, fewer than one hundred cats each year were turned in from 1929 to 1965 for money, for an average of forty-five payouts for cougar bounties each year. From 1997 to 2006, an average of 345 pumas were killed each year.
Today, pumas primarily inhabit the area from the West Coast to the Intermountain West. Except for California where sport hunting is banned, they are now hunted in record numbers. In ten western states (Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming), sport hunters killed 931 in 1982, reached a peak of 3,454 in 2001, and then dipped slightly in 2005 to 2,445. Texas does not track how many are killed by sportsmen.
From time to time, the media reports that intermittent pumas scatter to midwestern states. The Great Plains, however, act as a Great Puma Barricade. While dispersing, pumas require cover such as trees or brush for travel and for hunting. Waterways such as the Platte River offer pumas travel corridors to the east, but the difficulty of establishing breeding populations in the Midwest comes from pumas’ own dispersal tendencies. Young males typically travel further from the natal area than their sisters while looking to establish a home range. Also, males may have difficulties finding females in the Midwest, and thus establishing resident breeding populations may take some years.
Island populations of pumas have recently been documented in North and South Dakota. When those states discovered pumas in their midst, they immediately rectified the situation by setting draconian hunting quotas. In South Dakota, for example, all private landowners near the Black Hills can kill a puma, essentially resulting in unlimited quotas.
Many biologists claim that puma populations have rebounded, but the truth is probably as elusive as the puma itself. No historic baseline data exist, and even today, only a few subpopulations have been surveyed. Furthermore, the regulations that manage puma populations are inconsistent from state to state and based on arbitrary boundaries: hunt management “units,” state and county lines, and other distinctions that make no sense to the wide-ranging puma.
So, how well are pumas doing now? Truthfully, no one knows. Pumas, after all, are cryptic creatures. But their highly secretive nature, although a challenge to researchers, is likely what has ultimately saved them from extinction.