Agency Moves to Ensure Cougar Hunt : Fish and Game Officials Take the Offensive With a Lawsuit

Seizing the offensive in the battle over mountain lion hunting, state Department of Fish and Game officials have gone to court in an attempt to ensure that a recreational hunting season approved last week will go forward as scheduled in the fall.

The department and the Fish and Game Commission have filed suit in Sacramento Superior Court against the Mountain Lion Preservation Foundation, one of several groups that successfully sued the state last year to stop the proposed killing of 190 mountain lions.

Foundation leaders said Wednesday that they consider the suit a transparent attempt by the state to remove the case from the jurisdiction of San Francisco Superior Court Judge Lucy McCabe, who scuttled the hunt last year after ruling that the Fish and Game Commission had not adequately studied the impact the hunting might have on the lion population and the environment.

“This once again shows that they’re going to try to shoot mountain lions no matter what,” said William Yeates, an attorney for the Mountain Lion Coalition, which includes the Preservation Foundation. “They’re just going to roll over public opinion and figure out some way to get around what appears to them to be the last barrier, which is a court saying, ‘If you’re going to do it you have to look at the environmental consequences and you have to do some serious research.’ ”

Yeates contends that the mountain lion issue still belongs in McCabe’s court, even though her order applied only to the proposed 1987 hunt. The 1988 regulations are almost identical to the ones McCabe suspended last year.

Gene Toffoli, an attorney for the Fish and Game Commission, said the suit was filed in Sacramento because the capital is a more convenient location for the commission, the department and the state attorney general.

On the Offensive

Toffoli said the commission took the offensive in hopes of avoiding last year’s last-minute cancellation of the hunt. The foundation was chosen as defendant because it was one of the most prominent opponents of the hunt and one of the groups that sued the state to stop last year’s hunt, he said.

“We wanted to get it over with, get it done, have a court make a finding based on the record,” Toffoli said. He said the state did not want to get “hung up in another lengthy legal challenge.”

The state’s lawsuit was filed late Friday, minutes after the commission approved the 1988 hunting regulations at the end of a daylong public hearing in Long Beach.

Those regulations, if they stand up in court, will allow the first sport-hunting of mountain lions since 1972, when such killings were suspended by the Legislature. The Fish and Game Commission--five hunters appointed by Gov. George Deukmejian--has been considering a hunt since 1986, after Deukmejian vetoed a bill that would have extended the legislative moratorium.

Under the plan approved by the commission, hunters will be able to kill as many as 190 of the big cats in the northern and central parts of the state. Hunting lions will still be prohibited in Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Riverside, San Bernardino and Imperial counties, and part of Ventura County.

The suit seeks to have a judge declare that there is “substantial evidence” to support hunting the lions and to find that the commission adhered to state environmental laws and regulations while considering the hunting season.