Mountain Lion Hunting Season
A Superior Court judge rejected Fish and Game commission regulations intended to permit California’s first mountain lion hunting season in 16 years (Part I, June 21).
The mountain lion is a large carnivore with a large appetite for meat. It frequently travels 10 to 20 miles in 24 hours. The lion is solitary by nature. Each adult lion has a large home range that may cover hundreds of square miles.
Along the edge of this range they scrape up piles of grass and trash that they soak with urine, which act as boundary markers. Other cats coming to one of these scrapes, change course and leave the area. With 5,100 lions, each with his 100-square mile plot, all the wild places are taken. The new crop of young cats every year has no place to go that is not already claimed by an older and bigger lion, and they are forced into fringe area contact with people.
There have been too many lion encounters to just ignore this warning. Gov. Deukmejian has wisely placed the care of all wildlife to the Department of Fish and Game.
If the hunt is stopped and people are attacked and killed by lions, who will be at fault?? Not the governor, not the DFG.
ROLAND HILL
Pasadena
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