By STEPHANIE BUNKER
Moapa Valley Progress
Logandale resident Travis Draper had luck on his side when he went hunting for a cougar over Thanksgiving weekend. Draper had been putting in for the tag for the last 10 years. He was fortunate to draw the only nonresident cougar tag given out in the Utah Wasatch Strawberry unit, an area where only 10 cougar tags were given out total.
Originally from Payson, Draper was excited to be able to go back out and hunt cougar in the area where he grew up. It was something he had never done before.
Draper had foot surgery only a month and a half ago, so he was a little nervous for what to expect on this hunt. But luck was on his side and he got the best circumstances he could have ever asked for.
Draper hired a guide service called Sportsman Dream LLC to help him hunt the cat. The season for this tag is open for 6 months, from November to May. Draper and the guide service decided to give Thanksgiving weekend a try since he would be in the area anyway and had time off work.
“We hunted Friday and didn’t see anything, so we decided to give it another try on Saturday,” Draper said.
That day the party came across some land tracks. So they let the dogs loose to see what they could find.
Draper explained that it is more difficult for the dogs to pick up a scent when there is no snow on the ground. So the guide was patient with them.
The dogs had been gone for a while and the hunting party was hanging out and chatting. One dog came back up the road so they checked the GPS to track down the other dogs. According to the GPS the dogs had a cat cornered in a tree. So they took off to go take a look at the cougar.
According to Draper, cougar hunting parties have been known to have to hike 10-15 miles just in chasing a cat down. But on that lucky Saturday they found the cat up the tree only 150 yards from the road.
“We could see the cat from the 4-wheeler!” Draper said.
The group took pictures of the cat and thoroughly checked to determine if it was the cat he wanted. “I decided I wanted him so I took a couple shots at it and it came out of the tree.”
The hunters got the four wheelers close enough that they only had to carry it about 45 yards.
From what the group could tell the tom cat was a mature four year old. But they won’t know the official specifics on the animal until the Utah Fish and Game Department comes back with DNA tests. Draper explained that after the cat is shot it must be taken it into a game officer where they extract a tooth for DNA testing and put a tag on the pelt.
Draper wanted to hunt this specific area because it was close to home and it was a tag that wasn’t easy to acquire.
“In Nevada you can go buy a cougar tag,” he said. “But in this area you can be up there for a week and not see anyone else that is hunting the same thing.”
Draper also expressed how he enjoyed that the area was so close to the home he grew up in. “It gave me an excuse to go back home,” he said.
Draper enjoyed the hunt and couldn’t believe how everything came together so perfectly. “It was good to be with confident people that know what they are doing,” he said. “And, of course, luck had a huge part.”
2 thoughts on “Good Fortune Smiles on Local Sportsman In Cougar Hunt”
What is “sporting” about this?
Everything about this pathetic “sport” hunt makes me sick and is unnecessary.
Without predators, things fall apart. Utah’s Pando, reputed to be Earth’s largest living organism, is dying. We might be able to save Pando as a kind of museum piece by fencing it off to keep deer, elk and cows away, but that won’t help the millions of acres of other public forest and rangelands where ecosystems are being degraded and native plant and wildlife populations are suffering.
Part of the problem is the loss of nature’s top predators, particularly wolves and cougars, due to a long history of persecution. During the 19th and most of the 20th centuries, these species were regarded as nature’s thieves and murderers. Evolving scientific understanding of their ecological roles now portrays them as nature’s police force. In their absence, chaos breaks out.
One of the main arguments for why we need to hunt cougars is to keep the population under control to prevent depredations on livestock and pets. However, this is demonstrably not true.
In 1972, then governor Ronald Reagan declared a moratorium on cougar sport hunting in California. In 1990, a permanent ban on cougar sport hunting became law as a result of a citizen supported Proposition 117. Because of it, one must receive a state permit to kill a cougar for depredating on livestock or pets. And you must provide credible evidence that a particular cougar is the culprit. Recently, a large and powerful sportsmen group, Safari Club International, challenged the legality of Proposition 117 and the Appeals Court of the 9th Circuit recently shot it down in a unanimous vote.
Let’s look at the data. California has going on 39 million human citizens; Utah has a little over 3 million. Ratio 13:1.
California has between four and six thousand adult mountain lions; Utah has about 2000. Ratio: 2.5:1. As of 2016, California has 5,500,000 cows and calves; Utah has 820,000 cows & calves. Ratio: 6.7:1.
As of 2016, California has 550,000 sheep; Utah has 275,000 sheep. Ratio: 2:1.
California citizens killed 120 cougars on depredation permits in 2016 (the 27-year average is under 100 per year) and 0 via sport hunting; Utah killed about 40 on depredation permits in 2016 and a whopping 360 in the sport hunt for a total of 400.
Twenty-seven years of California history show conclusively how little truth there is in the dogma that we have to control cougar populations by hunting them in order to prevent depredations on livestock and pets: And the reason, it turns out, is that cougars control their own population sizes in response to the availability of prey; and in so doing, there is a reduction in the number of homeless juvenile males that are responsible for most cougar-human conflicts, including predation on livestock and pets.