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A lot of States that have moose allow only "one moose in a lifetime" to be harvested by an indivivual hunter. What is the opinion of houndmen to limit a person to harvest lets say " one cougar" every 10 years.
I think this would help stop people from harvesting cats just because they can. I am all for pursuing every year but not for harvesting every year. What does a person do with the cat hides after they have harvested more then a couple. What are your thoughts?

Darvin,
So lets say you killl a cat this year. So now you want to just persue right. Well lets just say that you are legal to persue and not kill now. So you turn out on a big ol tom track. dogs are cold trailing, then all of a sudden they are just smoking it up and over the ridge. You get to the top or the ridge and find they have traded ol tom for young juvenile cat and they are caught, But it sounds absolutly crazy down there, not like any old tree. Well you high tail it on down to the dogs and find that little cat stretched and to far gone to just pull the dogs and let it go. So since you are responsible for what your dogs do your a poacher right. NAH! Just leave well enough alone.

A female objective quota would be more realistic. I dont know what other states are like but in nevada You are responsible for what your dogs do. We also have a quota in place but it is for total cats female and tom, as far as I know we have never reached the quota. I dont agree with our quota system and wish it a female objective, Say 8 females and thats it boys till next season. Then people might think about it a little harder. If we were at 8 for a limit we would have been done mid december here in northwest nevada. I know for a fact the outfitters would be selective then.

Bottom line is houndsmen are going to have to start practicing catch and release if they want to be able to catch on a regular basis.

Thats my 2cents,
Cal Bryant

Good point Cal about the accidental kill. If a guy has a harvest tag in his pocket then it's OK; if not, what then? I'll agree 150 percent that it should be we the hounds men and women that make that decision to harvest and NOT a mandate from the state. The problem I see is not the hounds men taking too many lions but letting anybody that happens along kill the cat. In my opinion, there isn't anything wrong with the guy who trains the hounds and hunts them killing a lion, it's the tag along public that haven't earned the harvest.

There are ways for the public to earn that right, and that is train their own hounds and take the lumps that we have all taken or pay a hounddogger well for sharing his knowledge, hounds, equipment and time with the wannabe lion killer. Those are my opinions and each of you are welcome to your own!

I have a friend that has hunted lions most of his adult life tell me that if we the houndsmen don't place a higher value on these animals nobody else well. All of us have watched deer and elk tags, along with the guided hunts, go through the roof in price but we still have young men running down lions for gas or to "just be the hero." Until that attitude changes, and until we the people that feed and train the hounds put a higher value on those tom lions we'll continue to shoot ourselves out of a sport........

ike

You can make all the laws you want. But the guys that have to kill. Will find away around it so they can keep the body count up. There's a guy behind every bush that want's a lion. Mark

Cal- I see your point, but in most States when the quota is filled, a person can still chase. So if you get drawn and kill do you stop chasing because of the fear that you may catch one on the ground? I'm thinking not. I was just thinking that limiting a cat "one per 10 yrs." might make a person think a little harder before harvesting a female because they could hunt again the following year if they weren't successful in finding that big Tom. And I do agree that houndmen need to start regulating themselves and be a part of the decision making when it comes to lion hunting and the fw department. Any other Opinions out there? It great to be able to disagree without a pissing match. Maybe one day all houndsmen in all States will be able to do this.

ike,is on the money. you have to begin to place a higher value on the lion.lessons could be learned from oregon's ban. hunters now kill close to the same numbers as pre ban days how? more hunters are getting into hounds in oregon to specialize in bear and lions. fish and game allows two tags annually per hunter. so when the predator caller or person out hunting deer or elk happen along a lion they shoot it with out identifying it as a male or female first hand because they can and don't care.when you talk to many of these hunters they will tell you it is their duty to kill any lion for the good of deer and elk?coupled with aphis (federal guys)who will shoot any lion to justify tax dollars. at the end of the year you look at the ratio. you can't expect you base population to stay high for long when 50% of your harvest are females. i give this state five more years of declaring war on the lion. after that you will be hard pressed to harvest any lion in oregon.the only exception being the collared study area cats. again not too many will agree with me in oregon as they see the numbers of today.they are not thinking about tomorrow.... you guys in other states need to wake up! jmo

Mike= The same goes for here in Washington. More lions are being harvested by deer and elk hunters then before it was banned as well. If a person is hunting lions and is able to havest one great, but don't be deer and elk hunting and stumble upon one when you are not hunting lion and shoot it because our State throws in a cougar tag with every deer and elk tag package for 5 bucks. We have a couple units that are now open to draw hunts for houndsmen with a quota system for females. When the female quota fills, all permits in that unit are shut down. For example if there are ten total lions to be harvested with a two female quota, if the first two cats treed were females and both are harvested, knowone else that got drawn can kill a cat . The kicker .to this is that the quota and draw is set before the deer and elk hunter are out of the woods and their female kills count agaist the quota. Also any Dept. FW agent that kills one on a damage hunt also counts toward that quota. Some folks got drawn, and weren't about to hunt because the "boot hunters" or wildlife department had already filled the quota for females. Mind you, they do not have a female quota and if they saw one hundred females, all could be harvested and the season for them would still not be shut down. Can't understand their thinking. Just think that the "one" limit would be actually placing a higher value on the lion.

darvin, it is pretty sad! maybe both washington and oregon fish and game happen to be gearing up for the wolf?since they no longer manage the resource (lion)as a viable one. look at the deer and elk populations, how will the wolf survive? i'm sure washington state game managers are just as excited as oregon to see the wolf enter the state, as the le grande oregon biologist told me,we know they are here,we are just excitingly waiting to have enough breeding pairs to begin to properly manage them. what the hell does that mean? between the game commission and the forest service.if you can't out right ban logging and hunting, you just work up through the ranks and destroy it within.... our state's both have too many stupid hound hunters willing to pay out of pocket to help them out and destroy their own hunting. talking to my canadian outfitter friends on the border, they see the effects in their guide areas in b.c.with the killing of too many female's in washington state.i see many legal state's following down the same path. if i didn't know any better i would look at the lion as a predator not a big game animal, sort of like the old bounty days. the future is entirely up to the dog hunters to decide. but with no restraint it is just a matter of time.again....jmo

It would not matter if you limited it to 'one' every few years, because the majority of the folks who are whacking the hell out of the lions (and bears) are guides. It won't matter if they can only kill one because they have an unlimited supply of trigger pullers that only have one tag. Now don't get me wrong there are good ethical guides that care about the animals they hunt but the majority of them that I see anymore...especially in this neck of the woods (to bear hunt) amount to nothing more than a wildlife prostitution ring. Animals lives are devalued to the point of being nothing more than a bag of hundred dollar bills sitting in a tree. As long as the moneys coming they don't give a rats ass how many they kill or who lives/hunts in the area and they keep coming until they run out of animals and move the killing somewhere else. What to do abut that problem? I'm not sure, yes you do need to regulate the killing of females but remember those big toms and boars are the ones that are doing all the breeding. I am beginning to think that tighter regulations on guiding and out of area hunters will be the only thing that helps, as most people won't "crap where they eat" so to speak.

Right on the money buddy! One bad outfitter who is just out for money can really wreak some havack.

The key to any issue is education, especially lion hunting. One lion in ten years sounds a lot like gun control to me. If lion hunters are educated, then you will not need convoluted and overly cumbersome game laws. It worked here in Colorado and we now have more lions than ever before. After being educated on the population dynamics of the mountain lion, our lion hunters agreed to voluntarily, radically reduce the take of female lions. The D.O.W. said openly, that they did not think we hunters could do it. We suggested a one year trial period before they enacted any more regulations. It worked so well that our lion population has more than doubled. Because of this, the D.O.W has a huge amount of respect for the houndsmen of Colorado.

In the area I live in Northwest MT we are on a permit draw. This will be the third year of this. I personally think it is great! The lion population is growing super, the days of driving 250+ miles with out a track our over. If you cant find a track now you must be blind in one eye and can't see out of the other! LOL Since the permit harvest has been real low. You don't have to leave the house a 12AM anymore, now sleep till 6AM and have a great day. It seems like a lot of the hounddawgers whom felt they needed to make kills have parted with there hounds. I have not yet drew a permit and probably won't either, thats just my luck. I don't really care, I'm in it for the dogs. The thing that I am kind of wondering about here is how long can lions prosper with the game numbers falling like a spring rain? Were we live we have high numbers of G-bear, B-bear, Wolves, yotes and Lions. We all want a slice of the pie (deer, and elk) The deer hunters are a bigger voice then the handful of houndsmen. I almost wonder at times if MT is a big science project? How many predators can we have and still have game?

I kind of got off the subject at hand...SORRY.... The permit thing seems to smooth out a lot of the messes with race and chase that comes with over the counter quotas.

notellm,
just curious, are you guys able to persue if you dont have a tag? How are your game laws as far as dog owner responsibilty?

Darvin,
Maybe I jumped the gun on the persue thing. It may work great in states with more timber. States like Nevada where we hunt alot of treeless habitat catching on the ground and having accidental kills is very likely.

Liontracker,
That is awsome that things worked out so well for you all. I just believe that we have too many horn hunters with hounds here, and the NDOW likes it that way. That way Their precious big horn that they are trying to introduce everywhere will have a better chance.

Cal Bryant

"Take picture and leave it where you caught it so you can catch it another day."

If we dont draw we can still persue with a hound training permit. I guess I dont know what would happen if the dogs streched a lion? I am sure get some kind of ticket. I think the game and fish is fair as long as you come clean with what happend. I dont run bobs with my old dog after the quotas are met to be on the safe side.

NOTELLUM thats what we had before 96. It worked great, since the ban of 96 the fish and game dept. hates having a season. Our legislators are who pushed the season we have through now. The dept is not worried about population or anything management wise, they were told to have a season and now they do everything in their power to make the season as short as possible. They really don't like the pursuit part of it, their goal is to kill a few cats, grease the legislators that they are dealing with, that they are taking care of the lion population (which this hunt is called a safety removal not a general season) and will try to abolish this safety removal hunt when complaints reach a certain low.. That is what we are dealing with, not management or letting some hounding, its only purpose is to make the public think they are doing something about the complaints. We as houndmen look at male to female mortality, the dept. used the females as a way to shorten the season and they made it a race so hunters would shoot the first one (which the law used to say you had to shoot the first mature cat treed) The ban on hound hunting in washington has trumped all management and well fare of the animal issues.