As a Coloradan, former Colorado Congressman and U.S. Senator, avid outdoorsman and someone who has a proven track record of working to protect our state’s magnificent healthy landscapes and wildlife, I am pleased to support Proposition 127.
Prop 127 is simple: it protects Colorado wild cats from cruel and unsporting practices like using packs of dogs and traps to kill lions and bobcats for their heads and their beautiful coats.
The primary means for trophy hunting lions and bobcats is hounding, where packs of dogs fitted with GPS tracking equipment are set loose to chase, fight and eventually tree a cat. It’s typically a “guided” hunt and the client is given coordinates to go to the lion cornered in a tree and then shoots the animal like a fish in a barrel.
In fur trapping, bait in live cages lures in the bobcat. Preferred methods are bludgeoning or choking so as not to damage the fur, which is traded on the international market to make luxury clothing items.
These methods do not meet the hunters’ code of “fair chase” and resemble senseless killing more than hunting.
I am also joined in my endorsement with former congressman Tom Tancredo, a Republican, which makes this a bipartisan measure.
This measure conserves our ecologically valuable apex feline predators, by protecting lions and bobcats from commercial trophy hunting.
The sole purpose of such hunting is to sell the heads and fur of these remarkable and inspiring animals for selfish profit. There have been no legitimate reasons to continue the commercial killing of bobcats and lions for many decades. Now is the time to enshrine that undeniable truth into law.
It is an accepted fact among wildlife professionals that lion populations are self-regulating. Maurice Hornocker in “Cougars on the Cliff” explains that mountain lions “regulate their own numbers and actually help prey animals maintain or increase their population numbers.”
Lions evolved in the absence of any meaningful human killing. They occupy and defend vast territories clear of other lions. In California — a state with a comparable lion population but with no trophy hunting for the last 52 years — the big-cat populations have been stable, not increasing, and with a very low level of conflict with people.
Voters should realize that trophy hunting is detrimental because it heightens risk for human-lion conflict, by removing territorial, alpha lions. This means that if Prop 127 passes, we keep lions in their established ranges and don’t create disruptions that cause juvenile lions to fan out into more neighborhoods and ranches. These cascading effects of trophy hunting were affirmed by a letter signed by 22 professional wildlife scientists in September.
The measure is also endorsed by Dan Ashe, longtime former director of America’s top wildlife management agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife, who has worked more than four decades in the field of wildlife management and conservation and is currently president and CEO of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. And Elaine Leslie, former chief of biological resources for our National Park Service who lives on the Western Slope and has conducted numerous studies on mountain lions.
Prop 127 continues to allow Colorado Parks and Wildlife to manage individual lions posing any threat to livestock, pets and people.
Today, our agency instead manages a small group of people, so they can trophy hunt for lions, as our state statute and agency define such killing as a “wildlife-related recreational opportunity.” Random killing of lions for trophies, when the state still has no reliably accurate count of their populations, is not professional management.
Lion license sales produce negligible money for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, just 0.4% to our wildlife operations budget.
It turns out that lions are actually the key to healthy deer and elk populations — and, consequently, our future for deer and elk hunting. Native cats selectively target diseased deer and elk suffering from the incurable and infectious brain-wasting disorder known as chronic wasting disease, or CWD, which biologists say is a threat to the future of hunting in Colorado. Where lions roam, the incidence of CWD in deer and elk is low or absent.
In the end, Prop 127 is mainly about stopping a form of highly commercialized killing of our native cats by unsporting methods. It is also about letting the native cats do their vital ecological work.
If Prop 127 passes, we will let lions bring balance to nature as they cleanse deer and elk populations of CWD. We will also stop cruelty to wildlife that doesn’t meet the test of our evolving social norms about the proper treatment of animals. Hounding and baited trapping are relics of old-school antipredator attitudes.
“Yes” on Prop 127 is the vote to protect hunting, to preserve balance in nature, and to stop animal cruelty. Killing animals just for their heads and their fur is wrong and its time has passed.
Mark Udall of Eldorado Springs is a former Colorado U.S. Senator (2009-2015) and Congressman (1999-2009).
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