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Introduction
Mountain lions—also known as cougars, pumas and Florida panthers—are large carnivores native to the western hemisphere that have roamed North America for at least 10,000 years prior to European colonization (Culver 2000). In the United States mountain lions once ranged from the Pacific coast to the Eastern seaboard, where they were first encountered by white settlers who feared and vilified them as killers of deer and threats to livestock and human safety. Along with wolves and grizzly bears they were targeted for extermination through bounty and government sponsored control programs that would continue into the second half of the 20th Century. By the mid-1900s, mountain lions had been eliminated from the eastern two-thirds of the U.S. with only a small population left in southern Florida. Eventually, an increase in conservation oriented attitudes towards wildlife led to the cessation of the mountain lion bounties and the establishment of protections from indiscriminate killing by the early 1970s in all western states except Texas.
Today, mountain lions are recognized by scientists as playing an invaluable role in maintaining the health and resilience of the natural landscape (Terborgh et al. 2001; Logan and Sweanor 2001; Ripple and Beschta 2006). Since mountain lion populations require large areas on the order of thousands of square miles to survive, conserving habitat for mountain lions can also benefit a myriad of other species (Beier 1996). The mountain lion’s wide range, adaptability to a variety of habitats, and superior predatory ability may afford the species a more important ecological role than any other large carnivore in the Americas (Murphy et al. 1999).
However, state wildlife agencies and commissions have placed little emphasis on conservation and continue to manage mountain lions primarily as a resource for sport hunters and as potential sources of conflict with human interests. Under current management policies, lethal control is the primary technique used by wildlife agencies for “managing” mountain lion populations (Murphy et al. 1999).
These policies have led to a significant increase in the number of mountain lions killed by humans in the American West—a rise of nearly 400 percent from 1970 to 2000—which today greatly exceeds the number killed when the species were subjected to bounties and government eradication efforts (Figure 1; Torres et al. 2004).
Figure 1 . Reported human-caused mountain lion mortality in 11 western U.S. states, 1902-2000 (Torres et al. 2004)
These record levels of exploitation in the American West have caused concern among some conservation scientists, particularly in light of a 2002 decision by the World Conservation Union (IUCN)—which monitors the status of the world’s species through the IUCN Red List of threatened species—to reclassify mountain lions from a species of Least Concern to Near Threatened (IUCN 2002). The change in status was initiated by the Cat Specialist Group, an international committee of wild cat scientists, who determined that,
“based on estimates of density and geographic range… the puma’s total effective population size is estimated at below 50,000 mature breeding individuals, with a declining trend due to persecution and degradation of its habitat and prey base, and may possibly qualify as Vulnerable if these trends persist, or if better information on its status were available.”
In the western United States it has been generally assumed that the increasing rate of exploitation over the past several decades has not negatively effected mountain lion populations. However, in 2005, thirteen leading mountain lion scientists and managers cautioned that “Wildlife managers cannot assume that these unprecedented removal levels, especially when combined with the historically high levels of habitat loss and fragmentation that are occurring, have no affect on cougar numbers” (Cougar Management Guidelines Working Group 2005).
Since the mission of the Mountain Lion Foundation is to ensure the long-term survival of Puma concolor, we initiated this report to document the extent, causes and distribution of human-caused mountain lion mortality in the American West. Specifically, we considered a recent 8 year period, 1997 to 2004, when mortality records were available for all states and management units. Our goal is to inform and encourage scientific and public discourse on how mountain lions are managed and conserved in the United States.
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