A dozen years ago, cougar numbers on Vancouver Island had plummeted to 400 or fewer, barely half the total from the mid-1990s.
Now, the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations estimates the population has rebounded to about 600 cougars on the Island out of 5,150 to 7,000 in B.C., with a mid-range of 6,075.
Cougars can be hunted as part of a General Open Season “since they are not a conservation concern,” said Greig Bethel, a spokesman for the ministry.
But Chris Darimont, a University of Victoria assistant professor and science director of Raincoast Conservation Foundation, said no one knows for sure whether cougars in B.C. are a healthy population.
“That has not been studied directly.”
The cougar hunt on the Island runs from Sept. 1 to June 15, and is closed from June 16 through Aug. 31.
Throughout B.C., it is illegal to hunt a cougar kitten or an adult cougar with a kitten at any time, regardless of season, Bethel notes.
But Darimont said there is nothing to stop hunters from killing a mother after she has left her kittens in the safety of a nursery. Adult females remain targets on the Island for most of the year, he said, despite their importance to population health.
Bethel said wildlife biologists assess the health of cougar populations, including how many are hunted, their age, calls regarding problem cougars and prey population trends.
A project recently funded by the Habitat Conservation Trust Fund ($46,600) and the ministry ($10,000) will use DNA and computerized modelling to generate cougar population estimates for northern Vancouver Island.
Although Darimont is a hunter, he eats what he kills and calls for a more ethical approach to hunting carnivores such as cougars for trophies, rather than food.
“It’s irrelevant that there might be ‘enough’ cougars to hunt at this level,” he said. The cougar hunt amounts to letting a minority of hunters who want to boast about their trophies to cause unjustifiable suffering to wildlife and jeopardize the ever-weaker social status of hunting in general, he said. — Kathryn Dedyna
