I’m not lyin’, mountain lions, are, and should be allowed to thrive.
I love to backpack. And more often than not, I do it solo. And I know that comes with certain risks.
I was thinking about those risks when I recently did a radio show about mountain lion predation on livestock.
Now, I’ll be completely honest with you – when I swim in the ocean, I can’t stop thinking about sharks. But when I hike, solo in the Cascades or coast range – I almost never think about cougars.
My thinking and choice about which apex predator to fear makes no sense. After all, neither sharks nor cougars pose much of a risk to people. Sharks killed 4 people worldwide in 2024. Looking at the stats on cougar attacks – there have been 27 fatal mountain lion attacks on humans in the past 100 years. Just to put that in perspective, domestic dogs kill between 30-50 people every year.
But I’ve never been a rancher, and I’ve never owned livestock. The calculus changes a bit when we talk about cougars vs. goats, sheep and calves.
While still a rarity, cougars do attack and kill domestic animals. In fact, a recent story in local media highlighted an attack by a cougar just on the edge of Eugene that killed 12 goats – in one night.
I can’t imagine how both angry and heartbroken I’d be if those were my goats.
And I had a chance to speak with Eric Lee on my show, who was also featured on local media about this attack. He traps problem cougars for ranchers.
And I’ll say that I found him to be a very reasonable person and not some kind of bloodthirsty hunter. In fact, I think he probably respects and loves cougars as much as I do. He’s just a guy who sees what these magnificent yet deadly predators can do.
I also got a chance to speak with Janelle McCoy, a woman who works with many ranchers and owners of livestock as a shearer. And she’s about as pro-animal as you can get. Yet, she, like Lee, has seen what cougars can do. And it can be brutal.
According to Lee, when a cougar gets inside an enclosure with multiple livestock, they stop acting like cougars and start acting like serial killers. No longer do they stalk and hunt one animal like a deer. Instead, they frenetically dispatch one easy victim after another.
But here’s the thing. Oregon cougars are an environmental success story.
On my show I talked with Michelle Dennehy, a spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. According to them, we almost lost the species entirely in the 1970s as their total statewide population dwindled to a few hundred. Fast forward to now, and cougars number somewhere between 6,000-7,000.
There are a lot of reasons for this amazing comeback, but one that I heard from several people is the fact that hunting cougars with dogs has been prohibited in Oregon since the 1990s.
No dogs allowed
People are allowed to hunt cougars legally in Oregon, they just can’t do it with the aid of dogs. But as Lee told me, hunting cougars without dogs may be the most difficult kind of hunting imaginable. Cougars are masters of stealth and your odds of seeing a cougar in the wild, much less shooting one, are slim.
And so, despite habitat loss as more and more of our state’s wilderness is lost to human development, the cougar – free from dog hunting – has made a comeback.
There are some folks who want to change that. A bill before the Oregon Legislature would allow counties to opt out of the state’s ban on hunting cougars with dogs.
Under Senate Bill 769, voters could exclude their counties from the 30-year-old prohibition through ballot initiatives, though they’d still be subject to cougar management decisions from state wildlife officials.
I sympathize with livestock owners. But as Dennehy at ODFW told me, even with cougar numbers growing, we aren’t seeing a real increase in predation on livestock.
Of course, for a livestock owner, that doesn’t matter if your’re one of the unlucky ones that loses a sheep to cougars.
A difficult choice
But it comes down to a choice:
• Do I want one of the most spectacular and environmentally essential animals to thrive in Oregon? Absolutely.
• As a voter, do I understand and accept that some ranchers are going to lose animals to cougars? Yes. Yes, I do.
I also realize that this issue splits right down the old rural urban divide that characterizes our state. As an urban Oregonian, I understand that my opinion plays better in Eugene/Springfield than out in rural Lane County.
And as I mentioned earlier, I’ve never been a livestock owner, and can’t truly know their fear and frustration with a cougar attack.
But it seems to me that in our world right now, we have so few environmental success stories to celebrate. Shouldn’t the fact that a glorious animal like the cougar – nearly wiped out entirely but is now a stable species – be celebrated? And that 99% of the time it’s doing exactly what it was placed on this earth to do – hunt and control the population of deer and elk in our woods.
Of course, the state should continue and perhaps increase its program to compensate owners who lose animals to predators. And the ODFW should continue and expand its program to educate ranchers on ways to protect their herds from cougars.
But if a prohibition on dog hunts for cougars has helped this glorious cat make a comeback, let’s not mess with a good thing.
Michael Dunne hosts “Oregon on the Record” on KLCC (89.7 FM). He is a contributing writer for The Chronicle.
