Cougar-Hunting Ban Ends but Southland Is Excluded

Ending a moratorium of more than 15 years, the state Fish and Game Commission on Friday approved a sport hunting season for mountain lions in Northern and Central California.

The commission, on a 3-2 vote, excluded from the hunt all of Southern California south of Ventura County and the Tehachapis, as well as the entire California desert.

The decision calls for issuing licenses to 190 hunters allowing them to kill one lion each. State biologists estimate that only about 25% of hunters will be successful. The 79-day season will begin on Oct. 10.

The commission’s action was hailed as a breakthrough by hunting advocates, who contend that the lion population has grown dangerously large since the Legislature enacted a moratorium on hunting the cats that took effect in 1972. Opponents of the hunt said they would probably file suit in a last-ditch attempt to stop it.

Although the commissioners listened to more than 12 hours of often emotional testimony during three hearings on the issue, including five hours on Friday, the decision to end the hunting ban came with virtually no internal debate. The two commissioners who voted against the season--Abel C. Galletti of Rancho Palos Verdes and E. M. McCracken of Carmichael--said they did so because they supported a more limited hunt in which no more than 45 lions could be killed this year.

“We were told by the governor when he put us on here that we were to manage the resource to the very best of our ability for all the people of California,” said Commission President Albert C. Taucher of Long Beach. “That’s exactly what we intend to do.”

Taucher said the exclusion of Southern California from the hunt was not a result of the more intense opposition to the proposal coming from the southern part of the state. He said the Department of Fish and Game’s biological studies were not strong enough to support a hunt in Southern California.

“We really didn’t believe the department’s study was that extensive there,” Taucher said. “We think that needs a little more study.”

The commission also decided that the hunting season will be ended early in any area in which the Department of Fish and Game decides that 20% of the lions have been killed.

While the commission’s decision called for a more limited hunt than that sought by the Fish and Game Department, Director of Fish and Game Jack Parnell said he is pleased.

‘We Had Good Data’

“I think we had good data (supporting hunting) in Southern California,” Parnell said. “There was a tremendous amount of opposition generated from the southern part of the state. It’s not our decision to make. It’s the decision of the commission, and they made it.”

Kent DeChambeau, a lobbyist for the California Rifle and Pistol Assn., an arm of the National Rifle Assn., praised the decision as the first move toward a more expanded hunting season. DeChambeau and others have argued that lions are depleting California deer herds and thus limiting opportunities for deer hunters.

“This establishes the precedent we felt was necessary--that sport hunting of mountain lions, when it can be biologically justified, is appropriate,” DeChambeau said. “Obviously, I think there’s a lot more mountain lions out there that could be taken, but in order to get it started this is the precedent, and that’s fine. I have no objection.”

But the limited nature of the decision did not pacify opponents of the hunt, many of whom argue that not enough is known about the lion population in California to justify hunting the cats, also known as cougars. Other opponents contend that sport hunting is morally wrong and should not be allowed no matter how large the lion population grows.

The state estimates that there are now 5,100 mountain lions in California.

‘I’m Greatly Disappointed’

“I’m greatly disappointed,” said Richard Spotts, California representative for the Defenders of Wildlife. “The vote today indicates they accept the notion of a ‘harvestable surplus,’ that so long as you can hunt the species without bringing it to the brink of extinction, that’s acceptable.”

Yeates and Sharon Negri, executive director of the Mountain Lion Preservation Foundation, which generated 65,000 signatures on petitions opposing the hunt, said they will meet with their lawyers on Monday to decide whether to file a lawsuit to block the hunting season. They predicted that a suit will be filed.

Apparently worried about such a prospect, the commission took great pains on Friday to follow its procedures for holding public hearings. Although many of the 125 people who testified Friday--from 12 Berkeley elementary school students to a man representing a group called California Jews for the Wilderness--repeated what had been said at two previous hearings, the commission allowed everyone who asked to speak to do so.

The decision capped more than a year of emotional debate on the issue, including hearings at which opponents of the hunt testified dressed as lions. Proponents of the hunting season called a Capitol press conference on the eve of the commission’s decision at which they showed a videotape of one of two children mauled by lions in Orange County last year. One witness clad as a lion let out a piercing scream--as if she had been shot--upon hearing the commission’s vote to lift the hunting ban on Friday.