Utah declared open season on cougars. Why this program is drawing attention

Scott Chew, a Utah state representative for Uintah County and fourth generation rancher, keeps records of his sheep killed by cougars. While he suspects the average to be about 15 a year, there was one year where he lost around 70.

On his ranch in the eastern part of the state near Jensen, Chew also grows alfalfa and corn silage, which lures in the cougar’s primary food source, mule deer. About 80% of their diet is made up of the popular-to-hunt animals and some of those deer-hungry cougars, Chew said, wind up staying for the sheep.

Sheep are particularly good prey for cougars, who are known to sometimes “surplus kill” the vulnerable stock. They’ll go a bit crazy and kill more than they’ll eat.

That year’s high number was mostly due to just one old tomcat — a male cougar — that frequented Chew’s pastures. In a single night, the tomcat killed 23 sheep “in a pile,” he said.

Such violent stories and the subsequent perceived and real threats that cougars pose caused Utah to take aim at the big cats. What used to be a part of pioneer history that treated the large predators who sustain and support natural ecosystems as pests, has recently reemerged with a similar, but different vocabulary.

After years of policies protecting the cats, Utah opened hunting season on cougars in 2023, removing most restrictions on their taking. This past fall, the state added an initiative to its cougar management plans that is actively culling cougars from six areas in order to study the effects on deer without them.

After two years, the state says it does not have enough data to determine if those management programs are more detrimental than helpful, while wildlife advocates point to a declining population and lower harvest numbers as evidence that they do. Meanwhile, the baseline data — cougar population size — is an inexact science. Just like the anecdote, emotion and interpretation permeate the entire process.

What prompted a change in state law?

Cougars have been a bigger issue for Chew than they were for his father or grandfather.

That’s in part due to Chew’s sheep herd being the last remaining of what used to be seven in the area. But it’s also likely due to the fact that in 1967 cougars became a protected species in Utah, making it among the first states to do so.

Prior to that, the agrarian state had a different approach to cougar management. From 1888 to 1960, it paid a $2.50 to $30 bounty for killed cats and the government had a program called Animal Damage Control that hired professional hunters to protect imported livestock from native predators. From 1913 until they were protected, that program alone killed about 106 cougars a year.

The government still steps in to “take care of” a “situation” like the old tomcat, though. Chew clarified that meant a state tracker came in and shot it.

Chew’s not the only rancher who records how much livestock is killed by the region’s predators, either. The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources pays a dividend for each farm animal proved to be killed by wildlife, so specific data is dollar-and-cents relevant.

The state distributes that money out of a “depredation account,” but the fund is not unlimited. Depending on the year, ranchers may only get a percentage of the dead stock’s value, and none of its future earnings.

But for the past two years, sending a trapper to kill a problem cat is not the only way the state has stepped in to manage cougars.

Scott Sandall, a Utah state senator from Tremonton, said that at the time it wasn’t just livestock depredation that worried legislators.

“We had been seeing a number of additional cases of mountain lion to pet interaction, mountain lion to livestock interaction, and quite honestly, mountain lions and neighborhood interaction,” Sandall said. “We know that our population was increasing on mountain lions.”

Whether that kind of pervasive anecdotal evidence is supported by existing population counts for cougars is murky. Cougars range far, are difficult to spot, let alone count, and DWR’s own numbers are based on a technique called “population reconstruction.”

That method takes the ages and gender of the cats that are reported killed and, based on the trends of what’s coming in, formulates estimates of the adult cougar population. One expert called it a “rock solid” system, but “certainly not perfect.”

Still, the state found that Utah’s cougar populations peaked in 2016 with roughly 2,000 cats, with the range estimated to be between 1,800 and 2,400. Since then, DWR found that the numbers are getting smaller. By 2023, it approximated a population between 829 and 1,206. Today, that number is between 900-1,000.

Regardless, the state’s cougar hunting laws had no way to deal with an overabundance of cougars, explained state Rep. Casey Snider, the current House majority leader. Any suggestion of change stalled due to significant pushback.

But with sportsmen mindful of a mule deer population declining since 2018, constituents recording cougars in their neighborhoods with house cameras, continued depredation of sheep and canyon hikers videotaping protective mother mountain lions, Sandall and Snider added a last-minute provision to a hunting bill in the 2023 legislative session that would address the “increasing” cougar population.

“In an effort to try something different ... we did vote to try a new management system,” Sandall said. “That is, if you have a hunting license and you want to take a lion, then you go ahead.”

Open season on cougars

Without time for public comment or debate on the House floor, Utah passed HB469 into law in 2023. The broad hunting bill accomplished several things, including increased funding to acquire public sporting grounds, but is best known for how it “addresses the taking of cougars.”

In that provision, added on the 43rd day of a 45-day legislative session, the state made the “taking” — a euphemism for killing and hunting — of the large predators legal all year round. The bill also removed additional permit requirements to hunt cougars, allowing anyone with a generic hunting license to kill them and do so without bag limits. It also legalized the use of traps or snares.

Utah became the second state in the nation after Texas, which classifies cougars as “nongame animals” or varmints, with such limited restrictions on harvesting the big cats.

Among the 16 states where cougars remain, only Utah and Texas allow trapping. Approving trapping is plain overkill to some advocates.

“The recreational trapping of cougars has long been prohibited — and for good reason,“ wrote Sundays Hunt, Utah’s director for Humane World for Animals, in a Salt Lake Tribune op-ed at the time. “Cougar trapping is inherently cruel and will undoubtedly result in the nontarget captures of both wildlife and pets, including working dogs on our public lands.”

Utah still classifies cougars as protected and some hunting limitations do remain. It’s illegal to hunt kittens or mothers of kittens, and there are provisions regarding how often traps have to be checked and how they are identified.

The new management system, as Sandall described it, was not well received by wildlife advocates or, in some cases, hunters and sportsmen who didn’t want the additional competition or smaller populations.

And, as data about Utah’s current cougar populations become available — either through Government Records Access and Management Act requests, or DWR’s own publications and Utah Regional Advisory Council meetings — concerns have grown.

“I don’t feel like this law, it cannot be justified,” said Denise Peterson, founder and director of Utah Mountain Lion Conservation. “They’re calling out a total, all-out, full war on cougars and it certainly does nothing for Utah’s wildlife.”

Sandall, however, is clear that the law was never intended to annihilate the cougar population or lead toward extinction. It was intended to quell the concerns of a variety of Utahns, and he maintains a close watch on the updated numbers from DWR should the law eventually require change.

“This law was trying a different management technique that would at least keep our population where it’s at and quite honestly have some effect on some decrease in the population,” he said.

“For me as a legislator, when people start to say, ‘Oh my gosh, what are we going to do? Our pets aren’t safe. We’ve got a lion next to an elementary school ...,’ people start to anticipate that we’re going to have a little bit of a balancing here.”

What is a predator management study?

Last year, DWR reported that Utah’s mule deer population of nearly 300,000 is only 73% of what it would like to see in the state, which is around 405,000.

While there are many factors that influence mule deer populations — drought, variability of winters, disease, roads — another obvious one is predators. Through extensive study and the use of collars on the ungulates, DWR found that the volume of female deer killed by cougars in several parts of the state exceeded a healthy, sustainable percentage of 7%.

In conjunction with the Utah Wild Sheep Foundation, the Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife, and the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food, DWR launched a three-year study last fall to “to improve the amount and quality of their habitat,” Faith Jolley, a DWR public information officer wrote in an email.

To bolster the mule deer population and study the influence of cougar predation, the state will conduct “targeted cougar removals” in six hunting units across the state, Jolley wrote. Those are Boulder, Oquirrh-Stansbury, Pine Valley, Wasatch East, Zion and Monroe.

More plainly, the state is hiring hunters and trappers to go into those units and conduct “removals” — another euphemism for killing — of cougars.

“We’re trying to see and just understand how does eliminating the cat side of things — or not eliminating them, but trying to reduce the cat side of things — how does that affect the (mule deer) population? How does that affect all aspects of the population?” said Kent Hersey, the DWR big game projects coordinator, at the January Utah Wildlife Board meeting while introducing the study.

“Public hunters can still remove cougars on these hunting units, as well,” Jolley wrote. “These are sometimes difficult areas to hunt, and these additional efforts ensure we have people targeted to do removals on these units.”

At that January meeting, passions ran high and the public comment period was punctuated by emphatic applause after speakers — activists, advocates and hunters — expressed their arguments against the study. The board chairs did their best to quell it, calling it “inappropriate for this meeting.”

John Ziegler, chairman of the Mountain Lion Foundation and Utah Regional Advisory Council board member, highlighted what he called controversies. Namely, he called out how the study will use DWR radio collars to locate deer kill sites and then facilitate the contracted lethal removal of cougars, and also how the funding comes from deer hunting special interest groups.

“Against this backdrop (of HB469), allowing the predator management study to continue with the aim of removing essentially all cougars from six units is deeply controversial from a science perspective,” Ziegler said. “On behalf of the Mountain Lion Foundation and the many Utah citizens who may not even be aware that this predator management study is underway and who would be strongly opposed to it, I respectfully ask that you halt the study immediately.”

What do the numbers show since the law passed?

Cougars are elusive, secretive and prone to travel great distances. At any point, one could be crossing state lines. DWR once found a cat collared in Utah hundreds of miles away in Kansas.

Chad Wilson, DWR’s mammal coordinator responsible for cougar management, said that it “might even be impossible to count” cougars.

And, speaking about the “population reconstruction” method of assessing a population, Wilson said that DWR doesn’t “really rely a ton on that number as being a solid number, but we are able to gain trends out of it.”

Still, those are among the numbers the state uses to make the best possible decisions about cougar management. They show that the state was not necessarily subject to an increasing cougar population prior to signing HB469.

In 2004, DWR calculated that there were about 1,000 adult cougars in the state. By 2016, that number had doubled to its highest known size. But by 2022, the year before the law passed, the population had declined by about 30% from its peak.

Then there’s the reported harvest numbers from before and after the law was passed to consider. Overall, those numbers are up, but something curious happened last year.

In 2021-2022, Utah hunters harvested 476 cats — about a third of the total population. The first year the law was in effect, 530 were killed. The following year it was 501. Then, in 2024-2025, 371 cougars were reported killed.

Why did the number of cougar kills drop?

The decrease in harvest last year stands out.

Wilson said it could be due to several factors. Last year was a mild winter, for example, and it’s easier to track in the snow. Without it, hunters may have had a harder time than usual finding the cats.

Also, there may be fewer cats in the more popular hunting regions and sportsmen aren’t seeking out new grounds. “Maybe some of those areas that are easier to hunt, there’s not as many cougars there,” he said.

Another explanation, Wilson said, was that the population may be smaller than prior years.

Peterson agrees with Wilson’s third premise — it’s the result of smaller populations. In addition to her advocacy, she specializes in cougar mapping and habitat suitability analysis, while also making documentaries. Since 2017, she’s been actively filming mountain lions in Utah with more than 50 different cameras around the state.

“Since that bill was signed into law, the impact wasn’t immediately obvious, but this past summer in areas where we have cameras, we’ve seen a pretty significant decline in activity,” Peterson said. “Areas that were once consistently active have now become quiet. And the fact that I haven’t seen any kind of lion movement at all in several months has been very concerning to me.”

Her interpretation is anecdotal, she admits, but it is steeped in monitoring the animals in their habitats.

“There are less cats on the landscape to be able to hunt and kill,” Peterson said. “They can only sustain that level of hunting pressure for so long before they’re locally extirpated from areas.”

Chew and Sandall, however, have a different explanation. Both have heard that the reduction in harvest could be the result of a behavioral change from the new law.

Chew’s cougar hunting associates were “torqued,” he said, when the new law was passed, but now they appreciate the flexibility and are not going out as much as they used to. Sandall found the same thing. When it was a limited license, those who drew a tag made a dedicated effort but now they have more freedom.

“Now, one of the thoughts is, because it’s an opportunity that can happen anytime, people are just waiting for the opportunity,” Sandall said. “And if it happens, it does. And if I don’t see a lion, that’s OK too.”

Sustaining a viable cougar population

For the cougar population to sustain itself in a healthy way, wildlife managers determined that no more than 40% of the take can be female.

Since the law passed two years ago, the percentage of females in the reported numbers was approximately 56% to 60%, according to the DWR’s spring and fall RAC meetings.

DWR is aware of the female take percentages data, wrote Jolley, in an email.

“With the year-round hunting changes, we are currently tracking the cougar harvest and monitoring the harvest of females. If we determine that cougar numbers are decreasing to a point to not sustain a viable population, we would inform the Legislature and make recommended changes,” she wrote. “Currently, we do not have any recommended changes for cougar hunting.”

With the take data as of yet unclear, Sandall said the state just needs more time and information to make the next best decision.

“We’re probably into something of a five- to 10-year timeline to look at where the trends are and where they’ve gone to really discover what our takes have been,” Sandall said.

Are people following the law?

Peterson suspects that unreported hunting and trapping is going on. On her cameras, she’s seen juveniles and adults caught in traps, and mothers with missing toes, teeth and paws, which are all indicators of being snared. She’s found unidentifiable traps while filming, too.

The Humane World for Animals, an advocacy group passionate about Utah’s mountain lions and adamant that trapping be repealed, received evidence through a GRAMA request of at least one kitten caught in a trap. It was the only unreported kill that DWR was aware of at that time.

That hunter, whose trap was identifiable, was found to be following the law and checking his traps every 48 hours. In the report, the investigating officer determined the incident — a kitten caught in a cougar snare that was left in its habitat — to be a “freak accident.”

Wilson doesn’t agree with Peterson and believes that most hunters are trying to do what’s right and abiding by the law. “Like any part of life, there’s those that are trying to game the system,” he said, “I think most of our people are trying to be honest.”

Will these management plans work?

David Stoner, a wildlife professor at Utah State University, said that studying and proving whether the management plan works will be expensive, time consuming and difficult to quantify.

Say the state was trying to implement a predator management program to benefit an ungulate, Stoner said, it would have to find a way to both demonstrate that its actions reduced the predators in that region, and then show how that action led to a describable benefit. Something like longer female lifespan and more offspring, he suggested.

“It can be really tough to measure these things accurately because of the large spatial extents, the difficulty of marking and monitoring animals in rugged country. Utah is a mountainous state. It’s just not easy to get around,” Stoner said. “You’ve just got this smorgasbord of other factors that are bearing down on a population.”

Regardless, at a base level, killing cougars to help the deer or keep communities safe follows an understandable logic.

“There’s something very intuitive about seeing an animal that kills another animal and leading to the conclusion, ‘Well, there must be fewer of one species because this other one is feeding on it,’” said Stoner. “It’s hard for the public not to draw the conclusion that if predators weren’t there, we would have more deer, for instance.”

Which is part of the reason Peterson thinks Utah allowed such loose restrictions on cougar hunting in the first place.

“It’s easy to scapegoat a lion because they have sharp pointy teeth and they have this myth that surrounds them that they’re these bloodthirsty predators ... So, it’s easy to say, ‘Let’s just kill these cats.’ When in reality, their impact on mule deer and elk is minimal,” Peterson said. “They co-evolved with them for thousands upon thousands of years. If they were going to eat them all, they would have done it by now.”

At this time and with the current laws, DWR does not have the ability to put in place any caps or automatic closures on cougar hunting should the evidence suggest changes. The ability to make any substantial change to HB469 remains with state lawmakers.

Both of the law’s sponsors said they are open to reconsidering if the data suggests it. For now, though, the experts at DWR do not have any recommendations for the Legislature.