California bill gets it wrong: Hounding mountain lions won’t prevent conflicts | Opinion

The killing of 21-year-old Taylen Brooks by a mountain lion in El Dorado County in March of 2024 was both shocking and tragic. Brooks’ death reinforces our urgent need for a sustained and well-focused public policy approach to promoting public safety and sustaining human-wildlife coexistence.

But that’s not what a new bill introduced by Sen. Marie Alvarado-Gil, R-Modesto, would deliver. Her legislation, Senate Bill 818, would allow packs of hounds in El Dorado County to chase mountain lions “deemed to be a potential threat” right into trees, onto rock ledges or any place else until they are cornered.

To be clear, all of this is illegal now. And there are good reasons why the hounding of mountain lions should stay illegal.

The cruel hounding of mountain lions won’t prevent conflicts with these animals. In fact, in 2024, California Department of Fish and Wildlife researchers advised that “improving husbandry standards for pets and small hoofstock living in areas occupied by large carnivores may be the most effective way to reduce human-predator conflict in California and elsewhere.”

Moreover, after reviewing 20 years of California data, they conceded that they “did not find evidence that hazing with dogs is an effective method for displacing mountain lions from a conflict location.”

Overall, the risk of a lion attack is extremely low, with 11 fatalities in the time period 1924 to 2018. While we shouldn’t be unconcerned about the risk of harm to humans, neither should we disregard our responsibility to assess the underlying science: The hounding of mountain lions won’t prevent or mitigate conflicts.

Department of Fish and Wildlife researchers found that even “the permanent removal of offending individuals (lions) appears to increase the potential for conflict in the following year.” Hunting mountain lions doesn’t reduce the risk of their attacks on humans or livestock. Instead, the removal of territorial adult male lions encourages the immigration of multiple sub-adult males, who are less skilled at hunting. This causes more conflicts with humans and livestock, as the authors of another study observed: “Cougar-human conflict is positively related to trophy hunting.”

While mountain lion predation is rare and amounts to about 0.03% of the nation’s cattle inventory, studies show that those negative encounters are exacerbated — not mitigated — by hunting lions.

Mountain lions are valuable contributors to our ecosystems. Researchers found that they modulate deer herds, thus preventing overgrazing. This restores cottonwoods, rushes, cattails, wildflowers, amphibians, lizards and butterflies. Lions’ kills leave meat for other species, including black bears, wolves, beetles and eagles.

Lions also prey on sick deer and elk, reducing the spread of chronic wasting disease. With infections from the latter plaguing deer and elk herds at an alarming rate, it makes little sense to remove one of nature’s most efficient control mechanisms.

California voters understood this and more when they passed Proposition 117, a ballot measure that ended the trophy hunting of mountain lions in the state. Voters renewed that commitment when they returned to the polls in 1996 to reject a challenge to that law.

SB 818 threatens to do more harm than good, and passing it would be a mistake.

This story was originally published April 17, 2025 at 6:00 AM.