On the Saving of Individuals

Posted: 28 Apr 2008 09:00 AM CDT

Deb Durant and I have written (her far better than I) about the mountain lions at the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona for months, and I'd like to ask everyone a favor.

I talk a lot about seeing animals as individuals who have an interest in their own lives, free from the domination and torment (to say nothing of the slaughter) that occurs when we humans find a use for them or decide that they're in our way.

We have an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of, at most, a handful of mountain lions at Kofa. That difference, for them, is that between life and death, as the Arizona Game and Fish Department (AGFD) has decided the cougars (/pumas/mountain lions) should being collared and killed ("lethally removed") because the population of bighorn sheep is lower than it was in 2000, yet higher than it was last year. (Yes, you read that right.)

If you're thinking that it makes no sense to vilify and kill natural predators, particularly when their prey population has actually increased, and you must be missing something, you indeed are missing something: that tags for the hunting of bighorn sheep are a source of revenue for the AGFD, so they want to have as many bighorn sheep on the Kofa NWR as possible . . . . so people can kill them. You don't see AGFD calling for a decrease in people killing mountain lions. . . .

Hunting:

The 2008 season will commence on December 1, 2008, and run through the month. The results of the 2007 season are available in the January 2008 monthly update.

Mountain lions--the natural predators of the sheep--are being blamed for the fact that there are fewer sheep than in 2000, yet more than in 2006, yet there are myriad other reasons for sheep population decline and/or mortality. The report prepared by the Kofa NWR and the AGFD describes other factors, including:

Population response to drought
Water availability
Biological considerations (they are slow to recover, as a species, anyway)
Disease
Human disturbance
Translocations (to reestablish populations elsewhere)
Hunting ("Hunter success rates have averaged 89% for bighorn sheep on the Kofa over the last 20 years"-p. 19).

The Yuma Sun article Deb referenced a couple of days ago has a lively comments section and you can "Recommend" the article as well as individual comments. Please, at least do that (I did!). You'll find that even hunter Daniel Patterson agrees that the slaughter of mountain lions at Kofa is unethical. He writes:

"The real problem here is the unethical tactics of AZ Game & Fish using GPS collars not for real research, but to track and kill rare low desert pumas. I'm a hunter and most other hunters will agree it is unethical to use GPS collars to track and kill pumas."

Bighorn populations on the Kofa are going up -- something AGFD seems to not want to talk about. Between 06 and 07, the agencies estimate the bighorn population went up significantly from 392 to 460 animals. We should all be glad the bighorn population is going up, and the gov't should be honest about it.

The Kofa is a National Wildlife Refuge that needs ecosystem management, not single-species bighorn game farm management.

And now for that favor I was talking about . . . Please read letter from the US Department of the Interior regarding this issue. There is a "scoping period," which basically is a window for providing input that began on April 24 and will close on May 24. Please either send an e-mail to KofaLionComments@fws.gov or send a letter expressing your thoughts and feelings over this situation, and specifically saying that there is no need to kill the "offending" pumas (not to mention it's unethical) to:

US Fish and Wildlife Service
Southwest Arizona National Wildlife Refuge Complex
356 West 1st Street
Yuma, AZ 85364

The "Project Description" on the last page of the letter states it:

"is to allow for the limited removal, by government agents, of individual lions identified as regularly preying on sheep. The lethal removal of 'offending lions' in order to recover and manage bighorn sheep would be used when population levels of sheep fall below an identified threshold. A mountain lion would be considered an 'offending lion' if it preyed on more than one sheep in a six month period."

Lethal removal. Offending lion. More than one sheep in six months. And hunting season has not been affected.

Please write and save a handful of individuals in Arizona.