Mountain lions are our natural allies

A mountain lion in Colorado. (Courtesy of Colorado Parks and Wildlife)

I’ve hunted practically as long as I can remember, pursuing small game, upland birds, waterfowl, and deer, elk and caribou. It’s been a lifelong passion, and helped shape my values as a career wildlife conservation professional in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

I was privileged to lead America’s 570-unit National Wildlife Refuge System, the world’s largest system of lands and waters dedicated to wildlife conservation, at nearly 1 billion acres. And I was honored to be nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the 16th director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, serving as director for nearly six years.

I readily admit, I’ve never been much for so-called “trophy hunting,” the subject of Proposition 127. Especially so, when the animals are chased to exhaustion by commercial outfitters, using dogs and GPS tracking, and then shot by a “hunter,” while perched helplessly in a tree. It violates a foundational value for “fair chase” that I was taught as a child. I was also taught that hunting is a form of harvest, yielding “free range” delicacies that reconnect us to the land and water. Part of that connection is a learned respect for the game we hunt, not desire to dominate or eliminate them.

But hunters are predators, and as a community, we have long harbored a bloodlust for competitors, like mountain lions. We have contributed to societal mythologies and fears, and despite the wisdom of mid-1900s conservation scholars like Aldo Leopold, we have continued to scapegoat and brutalize these creatures in the name of game management.

Maybe we do this to hide our own inadequacies. It is much easier to blame declining elk or deer populations on mountain lions or wolves, than to grapple with habitat loss and fragmentation, drought and water scarcity, and changing climates. Those would require that we deal with humans and our ever-expanding desires for more, and cheaper, and easier, and now.

And even more nonsensical, emerging science is telling us that these apex predators aren’t the enemy, but rather, allies. They are likely providing an important ecosystem service in checking the spread of chronic wasting disease, or CWD, an existential threat to healthy deer and elk populations.

Forty-two of Colorado’s 51 deer herds and 17 of 42 elk herds are infected with this 100% fatal, brain-wasting malady. The disease started in Colorado and spread across the Midwest and Rockies. It has killed hundreds of thousands of elk, deer and moose, and it’s getting worse.

The pathogen is not a virus or bacteria but a “prion” — a protein that slowly and painfully destroys brain tissue in deer and elk. There is no evidence that these CWD prions are “zoonotic” and can infect humans, but public health officials warn against eating CWD-infected game in precaution.

Prions aren’t living things, so they can’t be killed with antibiotic or antiviral medications. They can only be “deactivated,” and amazingly, science is telling us that they are deactivated in the digestive systems of predators like lions and wolves. So, again, these animals are our natural allies.

As a scientist, I know that correlation is not causation, but sometimes it can be a powerful indicator. There is good science that lions will selectively prey on CWD-infected animals, and that makes sense, because infected animals would be weaker and easier to kill. And what we can observe is that where there are no lions, there are higher rates of CWD-infected animals, and where there are lions, there are low levels of CWD infection, or none at all.

Killing 500 lions, every year, in Colorado is not simply unscientific and unethical, it is interrupting their vital work as a bulwark against CWD.

For as long as there have been hunters, and as long as hunters have been managing wildlife, we have scapegoated and persecuted apex predators, like mountain lions. It’s time for change.