Lions in Texas Part 2

Posted on April 10, 2017 by Leslie

I wanted to do another short lion post on Texas. Short because there is literally nothing going on with protections for mountain lions there; hasn’t been since the Mexican-American war. Truthfully, every time I think about the status of Mountain Lions in Texas, it infuriates me. I would hope it begins to infuriate others, especially Texans.

Cougar

I spoke with Jonah Evans whose the mammalogist for the entire State. A study done by Joseph Holbrook in 2011 compared the genetics of South Texas, West Texas, and New Mexico. It showed that cougars in South Texas had decreased by at least 50% historically, were inbred, and generally not doing well. The Trans-Peco region of West Texas was still holding up o.k. The Trans-Peco region has immigration from mainly Mexico and probably some cougars from New Mexico. It is an area with large ranches, a lot of them older ranchers trying to eek out their living. In addition there are large ‘game’ ranches where people come to hunt deer and exotic species, paying the big bucks. Those ranchers hire trappers to rid the area of cougars who kill their commodity. South Texas by comparison is contiguous with sheep and goat ranchers, easy prey for cougars. Immigration would come mainly from Big Bend National Park.

Confirmed sighings of lions in Texas in the last ten years

The reality is that Texas is a state with almost no public lands and where private landowners have a lot of political power. It comes down to a private rancher or landowner who might not care if he has cougars on his property, and so lets them live. This makes for a hodge-podge of lands that cougars move through, some safe and others not.

Mountain lions are considered a nuisance animal–varmit–and can shot anytime, anywhere, without telling anyone. There also are no trapping regulations on cougars. At this point the only reason why Texas has any mountain lions at all is because of immigration from Mexico. cougar print

One thing Jonah Evans mentioned (that I could tell upset him as well) is that the usual trapping regulation for fur-bearing animals in Texas (36 hour trap check) do not apply to Mountain Lions. They also do not apply for bobcats and coyotes. There are trappers out there, he told me, that leave their traps out for a month, big steel bear sized traps, without checking them and it’s perfectly legal.

Cougar exhibits a flehmen response

In 1992 the Sierra Club did a campaign for several years trying to bring attention to the plight of the Texas Mountain Lion with the hope of changing their status to trophy game with a legal hunt. It was all over the news, but got no traction. The biologists I’ve spoken with all told me about that effort as if it had been yesterday. Since then, nothing’s happened.

Jonah felt that if people actually knew the status of mountain lions, the trapping that is not regulated, and the shoot on sight policy, they’d want change. As it is, Texas is definitely the Lone Star state, as all the other Western states identify mountain lions at the very least as a valuable animal that deserves game status and regulations.