Study: Poachers kill as many deer in Oregon as hunters
By Associated Press

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has found that poachers are killing as many mule deer as legal hunters.

The poaching is considering a contributing factor to a decline in the state mule deer population, which has fallen to 216,000 animals from historic peaks of more than 300,000.

Research supervisor DeWayne Jackson in Roseburg said poachers typically kill female deer, which are more important to reproduction. Licensed hunters kill more bucks than does.

"If we look at the illegal take, it's basically equal to the legal take — it's bad," said Michelle Dennehy, a Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman in Salem. "Poaching is not ethical, it's not hunting."

State biologists discovered the level of poaching during a five-year research study of deer between Bend and the California border, The Oregonian reported. The state study of 500 mule deer fitted with radio collars was conducted between July 2005 and last January.

Researchers said 128 deer died during the study. Of those, poachers killed 19 and hunters legally shot 21. Cougars killed 15 and eight were hit and killed by cars.

Of the rest, five succumbed to coyotes, disease claimed five and four others died while tangled in fences or from some other accident, Jackson said.

Biologists listed 51 as "cause of death unknown," but poachers could have taken some of those, he said. "Sometimes we just find the radio collar laying out in the sagebrush," he said.

Because the study wasn't designed to detect poachers, biologists don't know if other areas have comparable numbers of deer taken illegally, said Don Whittaker, Fish and Wildlife ungulate coordinator.

But wildlife managers suspect poaching is happening across Oregon.

Poaching "is out of hand in Oregon," said Ken Hand of Klamath Falls, regional director of the 11,000-member nonprofit Mule Deer Foundation based in Salt Lake City. "It's going on all over the state, 365 days a year. From all the contacts I have around the state, I just hear about it constantly."

The chance of Oregon's mule deer population ever rebuilding seem pretty slim "with the predators out there, including the humans," he said.

Oregon mule deer are native to the state and typically found east of the Cascade Range crest. Wildlife managers say the deer are under intense pressure from predators, including an estimated 5,700 cougars roaming Oregon's forests and high deserts, up from 2,600 two decades ago.

Oregon also has 25,000 black bears, and Canadian gray wolves have staked claim to the state's northeastern corner. All three species prey on mule deer.

Automobiles, too, account for plenty of mule deer deaths. A Fish and Wildlife study documented 1,626 mule deer killed by motor vehicles along 150 miles of U.S. 97 and Oregon 31, south of Bend, between October 2005 and January.

Dennehy said habitat issues are also a concern in central Oregon, where resort development, new homes and other human activities have sharply reduced winter range for mule deer.

It's difficult to catch poachers in the act, said Oregon State Police game officer Chris Hawkins of La Grande.

Many areas simply don't have many officers, he said. Wallowa County, which is the size of Delaware and Rhode Island and has a population of 7,150, has three game officers, Hawkins said.

Dennehy said the Oregon Hunters Association's "turn-in-poachers" program, or TIP, offers rewards, but that won't cure the problem.

"It's a very vast landscape," Dennehy said. "We can't have eyes everywhere."

___

Study shows surprising rate of mule deer poaching

Published: Monday, November 15, 2010, 9:21 PM     Updated: Monday, December 13, 2010, 10:59 PM

Nick Myatt, Oregon Department of Fish and WildlifePoachers often like to shoot deer as trophies, wildlife officials say. They can make thousands of dollars selling mounted heads as decorations.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct the number of whitetail deer in Oregon.

LA GRANDE -- The 62-year-old retired eastern Oregon businessman admits to poaching dozens of Oregon mule deer over the past 35 years with everything from .22-caliber rifles to scope-sighted hunting rifles.

That's the way he grew up in the Midwest: Poaching was a rite of passage in a culture of blue-collar rural men who held down their grocery bills by illegally killing a deer now and then.

Deer population

Early days: Mule deer numbers have fluctuated dramatically since explorers Peter Skene Ogden and John Fremont passed through Oregon between 1826 and the 1840s and reported seeing few of the deer. By the late 1850s, gold miners reported abundant populations in eastern Oregon.

Midcentury: Mule deer continued to increase during the 1930s, '40s and '50s -- a time when they had little to fear from cougars and wolves, which were largely wiped out by humans. (Not correct, this is when ODFW started the artificial birthing program by killing off the predators and altering the landscape, damaging the ecosystem.  Old timers understood the value of the cougar and stopped killing them then...)

By the 1980s: The mule deer population topped out above 300,000. (it took us 34 to 47 years to get 3000 cougar back and the deer population was doing wonderful during this time period) Voter passage of Measure 18 in 1994, followed by a bill enacted by the Legislature three years later to clarify the law, abolished the sport hunting of cougars and bears with hounds, resulting in a dramatic upsurge in cougar numbers (not true, ODFW changed the cougar hunting regulations by increasing the season to one year, reducing the cost of the tags, implemented a mandatory Public Safety program killing 3000 cougar a year (not counting the 1000's of cubs killed in this process) and included the tags in a package program all resulted in more cougar being killed after M18 than before M18.) and a simultaneous decline in mule deer in some areas.

Other species: Western Oregon's blacktail deer, a subspecies of mule deer, populations also are declining. They number about 320,000, down from 387,000 in 1998. The state also has less than 20,000 whitetail deer in northeastern and southwestern Oregon.

Elsewhere: The populations also have fallen in Idaho, Wyoming, Utah and Colorado, states with predator and habitat problems similar to Oregon's.

In his view, most Oregon poachers are rural men like himself "who have been in the woods all their lives." The man, who spoke on condition that his name not be used because he could get in trouble, says he's never gotten caught.

But he's tapered off considerably in recent years: He doesn't really need the meat, and getting arrested would bring unpleasant legal consequences that he doesn't need at this stage of his life, he says.

But he admits: "It was a habit that was hard to break."

Poaching is a habit that too many Oregonians apparently share. Mule deer populations have  dropped in Oregon to 216,000 animals from historic peaks of more than 300,000 and poaching is one of the reasons why, state wildlife managers say. Current numbers are far short of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife's mule deer population objective of 347,400.

State biologists recently discovered a shocking level of poaching while conducting a mule deer distribution study in central Oregon south of Bend.

"If we look at the illegal take, it's basically equal to the legal take -- it's bad," says Michelle Dennehy,  a Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman in Salem. "Poaching is not ethical, it's not hunting."

Worse, the five-year research project shows poachers typically take female deer, said DeWayne Jackson,  Fish and Wildlife research supervisor in Roseburg.

"Does are extremely important" so the herds can reproduce, Jackson said. Legitimate hunters -- those who buy licenses and tags, put in for controlled hunts and confine themselves to designated seasons -- kill more bucks than does, he said.

The state study was conducted from Bend to the California border. Of 500 mule deer fitted with radio collars between July 2005 and last January, 128 died during the research. Of those, poachers killed 19 and hunters legally shot 21.  (The ecosystem cannot sustain enough deer for human pleasure to kill.  Take care of poaching issues first and reduce the artificial birthing rate of deer and leave the cougar alone.  If you continue to blame and kill the cougar, another predator will simply move in.  More poachers will take the place of cougars and the ecosystems will collapse.) Cougars killed 15 and eight were hit and killed by cars (again, more human killing. Humans killed a total of 48 plus deer - more than twice as many as the cougar.  Killing our cougar is not going to help the deer population, stopping the poaching will). Of the rest, five succumbed to coyotes, disease claimed five and four died while tangled in fences or from some other accident, Jackson said.

Biologists listed 51 as "cause of death unknown" but poachers could have taken some of those, he said. "Sometimes we just find the radio collar laying out in the sagebrush," he said. (Human killing issues far exceed normal cougar killing).


Because the study wasn't designed to ferret out poachers, biologists don't know if other areas have comparable numbers of deer taken illegally, said Don Whittaker, Fish and Wildlife ungulate coordinator, but they suspect poaching is happening across Oregon.

Poaching "is out of hand in Oregon," said Ken Hand  of Klamath Falls, regional director of the 11,000-member nonprofit Mule Deer Foundation based in Salt Lake City. "It's going on all over the state, 365 days a year. From all the contacts I have around the state, I just hear about it constantly."

The chance of Oregon's mule deer population ever rebuilding seem pretty slim "with the predators out there, including the humans," he said. (Mostly humans.  Look at how many are poached and killed legally.  Not only can the vegetation not sustain them, ODFW has an artificial birthing rate that is not normal for mule deer.

Other killers

Oregon mule deer -- native to the state and typically found east of the Cascade crest --  are under intense pressure from predators. An estimated 5,700 (wrong numbers) cougars roam Oregon's forests and high deserts, up from 2,600 two decades ago, according to state statistics. Oregon also has 25,000 black bears, and Canadian gray wolves have staked claim to the state's northeastern corner. All three species prey on mule deer. (but not to the extent of humans killing them for Sport (fun)).

Automobiles, too, account for plenty of mule deer deaths. A Fish and Wildlife study documented 1,626 mule deer killed by motor vehicles along 150 miles of U.S. 97 and Oregon 31, south of Bend, between October 2005 and January.

Overshadowing all that in central Oregon are habitat issues, Dennehy said. Resort development, new homes and other human activities have sharply reduced winter range for mule deer, she said.

Expanding juniper forests are especially worrisome, she said. Juniper siphons away large volumes of water, leaving little moisture for plants and grasses that nourish mule deer, Dennehy said. The wildlife department is logging juniper in the Murderers Creek area of Grant County and culling dozens of cougar in other areas, including Harney County's Steens Mountain, to ease pressure on mule deer, elk and cattle, she said.

Poacher motivations

Poachers are the great unknown predator.

View full sizeODFWOregon State Police troopers Jim Collom (left) and Randy Caldwell confiscated deer head mounts discovered in an investigation in Harney County in summer 2008. They cited three people for falsely applying for hunting tags and unlawful possession of deer.

Deer are Oregon's most popular hunting species, and illegal hunters are motivated by all kinds of things, including a desire to get a jump on the hunting season, annoyance at state game laws, a  desire to shoot and kill something, or the money they can get for trophy heads.

Trophy animals (including cougar) can bring thousands of dollars for poachers who sell the mounted heads to people who want to decorate a home, office or business. The Legislature has tried to crack down on the practice, making it illegal to kill a deer with four points on each antler with a fine of $7,500, but the problem persists.

Hunting fees are another reason: Increases for licenses and tags brought revenues soaring to $21.6 million in 2007, up from $9.2 million in 1987. A "sport pack" of hunting and fishing licenses with elk, deer, cougar, bear, waterfowl, upland game birds, salmon and shellfish tags now costs $164.75.

Poachers may be filling in the gaps caused by an overall drop in hunter numbers in Oregon. The state issued 283,000 hunting licenses overall last year, (that is almost the population of deer! Human predators leave nothing for the natural predators!)down from 336,052 in 1987 and 329,211 in 1975, according to Fish and Wildlife figures.

It's difficult to catch poachers in the act, said Oregon State Police game officer Chris Hawkins  of La Grande. Many areas simply don't have many officers, he said. Wallowa County, the size of Delaware and Rhode Island with a population of 7,150, has three game officers, he said.

View full size

And poachers often work quickly -- within minutes after killing a deer, they move on, Hawkins said. "They take the backstrap and hindquarters and they're gone," he said, noting that scavengers strip the rest and scatter the bones within a week or two.

"Think of an elderberry bush out in the woods and how many elderberries you can pick off before a game warden walks by," he said. "We would have to be right there at just the right time."

As one poacher told him during a criminal case: "Some people do cocaine. Hunting is my drug."

Ways to address the problem include hiring more OSP Fish and Wildlife Division troopers, raising fines and offering rewards for turning in poachers, Dennehy said. The state hired two more OSP game officers this year in Bend and Prineville.

The Oregon Hunters Association's "turn-in-poachers" program, or TIP, offers rewards, but that won't cure the problem, she said. (stop the poachers, not the cougar)

"It's a very vast landscape," Dennehy said. "We can't have eyes everywhere.

POACHING IN OREGON

Oregon is changing and so is poaching, of which hound hunting is a basic poaching tool.  According to Oregon State Police stats, poaching has frequently  exceeded legal killing of deer, elk, bear, cougar, ducks, fish and other wildlife. The millions of dollars lost each year to poaching is staggering. Poaching has now become deeply affiliated with aggravated theft, racketeering, conspiracy, hunting for another person, unlawful possession of big game parts and sharing in the proceeds of a wildlife offense, and identity theft. All of which makes it easier to understand Oregon’s unusual and unique yearly assembly of rare-hard-to-find cougars (according to ODFW and hound-hunters, the reason why they need dogs is to even find cougars!) suddenly showing up at bus stops, schools and neighborhoods acting in domesticated manners and always during the time of State Legislative Assembly. No cougar raised in the wild would do this unless perhaps if they were orphaned due to hunting/poaching or the kittens taken from the wild and kept in captivity. I am confident that none raised in the wild could manage so many yearly and timely gatherings all by themselves at school bus stops that coincide with Oregon State Legislative Assemblies. We don’t need hound-hunting in Oregon. We do need more honest politics about cougar. We do not have the money to fund more police and wildlife officers to handle the increase in crime and hunting accidents hound hunting would bring to Oregon. The voters have voted TWICE to protect Oregon's cougar from hound hunters and the animal abuse and crime it brings in!

Since M18 was voted in, right around State Legislature time there have been unusual sightings or conflict with cougar that are out of character for them.  Many of these types of conflicts with cougars could be due to the fact that cougar kittens are some of the few wildlife that can be taken from the wild and immediately domesticated. Please view the YouTube links below confirming this.

Flawed data equals flawed science...

Most hunters are not reporting the results of their big-game and turkey hunting tags despite the fact that it is mandatory.
Compliance rates average about 35 percent for all of the tags sold that have a reporting requirement, Fish and Wildlife officials said.

September 17, 2010 Statesman Journal Newspaper: 

Mandatory reporting: Numbers are lagging
Most hunters are not reporting the results of their big-game and turkey hunting
tags despite the fact that it is mandatory.
Compliance rates average about 35 percent for all of the tags sold that have a
reporting requirement, Fish and Wildlife officials said.

Cougars in chaos

How a state hunting policy pushed Washington's big cats to the brink

News - From the April 14, 2008 issue of High Country Newsby Liza Gross

Browse images »

Hot on the heels of a cougar, Catherine Lambert could barely contain her excitement. She had nearly nailed the location of a radio-collared female first captured the previous winter, when her telemetry antenna signaled that the cat had abruptly changed its speed. She must be running after a meal, Lambert thought. Then the Washington State University graduate student heard a strange howling, and soon after, lost the signal.

"The next day, we received a call to retrieve her radio collar," Lambert says, her soft French-Canadian accent tinged with sadness. Hunters had chased down and killed the cougar, which - just a few weeks before - had been traveling with kittens.

The same thing happened again and again as Lambert and her fellow researchers followed cougars through the forests of northeastern Washington in 2002. As the body count mounted, "the bell went off," Lambert says. "I thought, 'There's something really wrong here.' " In the end, the dispirited research team collected 22 collars - nearly half of their study subjects. The scientists worried that overhunting could be placing the state's cougars in serious jeopardy.

At the same time, a growing chorus of newspaper columnists, politicians and ranchers claimed that Washington's cougar population was exploding and called for even more hunting. A 1996 statewide initiative (I-655) that banned the use of hounds to hunt cougars, they said, had allowed the cats to flourish and increasingly threaten livestock, pets and people.

In reality, as the researchers would show, the measure led to the highest rates of cougar slaughter since the height of the predator bounty-hunting era in the 1930s and '40s. Ironically, biologists like Lambert now suspect that all this killing - originally authorized to reduce cougar-human conflicts - may actually be triggering yet more dangerous encounters.

The spike in cougar deaths resulted in part from a radical change in the state's game-management plan. After the hound-hunting ban passed, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife officials quickly liberalized hunting regulations in order to control the cougar population and maintain the revenue from cougar licenses. They extended the hunting season by six months, doubled the legal bag limit, and rolled half-price cougar tags - traditionally sold to just 1,000 hunters a year - into big-game hunting packages.

Under the new policy, nearly 60,000 deer and elk hunters hit the woods each season with cougar tags in their pockets. Still, complaints about cougars skyrocketed. Before the hound-hunting ban, such complaints averaged about 250 a year. They more than doubled the year after the ban before peaking at 936 in 2000.

Notoriously shy by nature, cougars would just as soon avoid humans. But Washington's rapid population growth - nearly 60 percent above the national average between 1990 and 2000 - and the attendant loss of 70,000 acres of undeveloped land each year reduced the wide-ranging cats' habitat, forcing them into closer contact with humans.

Though only 2,500 to 4,000 cougars lived in the state, they seemed to be causing consternation everywhere, eating endangered caribou and deer, killing livestock and pets, even attacking the occasional human. Cougar attacks on people are rare - lightning strikes are more common - but eight of Washington's nine recorded attacks occurred in the 1990s, including the mauling of two children in the northeastern corner of the state.

Complaints were especially high in Okanogan County, where Washington's only recorded fatal cougar attack on a human occurred in 1924. Okanogan County commissioners threatened to declare open season on cougars, arguing that the increased number of complaints meant that there were too many cats. Rancher Joel Kretz, now a state senator, blames the hound-hunting ban for the heavy losses he sustained on his Okanogan County property. "For a while, there were cougars everywhere," he says. "And for a while I was losing half my foal crop." Kretz stoked local fears about cougars by circulating a grisly photo in 2003 that showed a colt missing a wide patch of skin from its flank.

The growing hysteria fueled a legislative blitz to once again expand cougar hunting. By 2004, nine statewide bills had been introduced to reverse or circumvent the hound-hunting ban. Two of them passed: One authorized the use of hounds for public safety hunts and the other launched a pilot program that gave commissioners in five northeastern counties control over emergency safety hunts. On March 13, Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire, D, extended the pilot program through 2011 - and opened it to all counties in the state.

All these legislative efforts were based in part on the untested assumption that the hound-hunting ban had caused a rapid rise in cougar numbers and a consequent increase in run-ins with people. But even as state wildlife officials and politicians unleashed more hunters, Lambert and other researchers began to uncover evidence that this popular notion was dead wrong.

By the time Lambert began her work at Washington State University's Large Carnivore Conservation Laboratory in 2002, lab director Rob Wielgus and his team had already captured and collared 32 cougars in the Selkirk Mountains at the junction of Washington, Idaho and British Columbia. Their efforts over the next several years revealed some unexpected and disturbing trends. Over half of the cougar kittens and yearlings - and nearly 70 percent of adult males - were dying each year. Hardly any mature cougars were left. Hunters were responsible for most of the deaths, and indirectly killed many kittens by shooting their mothers. By 2000 - even as cougar complaints reached an all-time high - "the population was tanking," Wielgus says. If these kill rates continued, the group reported in 2006, the area's cougars would be gone within 30 years.

Cougar kittens in the Colville National Forest, southwest of the Selkirks, were also faring poorly, as were adult females. But the population appeared stable because immigrants, mostly younger males, were moving in to fill the gaps. "But males won't stick around if there aren't any females," Wielgus says. And without females, a population is doomed.

"Everybody thinks that wolves, cougars, and other big predators are very resilient to hunting," Lambert says. But when the killing is heavy and widespread, even immigration from outside areas stops.

Intensive hunting was creating chaos at both research sites. Mature male cougars maintain order by keeping the younger males in line, Wielgus says. Without them, the cougars' home ranges and population densities were "shifting all over the place." Infanticide had increased, and the cats were getting into far more trouble with humans. Mounting evidence suggests that inexperienced yearlings - the "hooligan" teenagers, as Wielgus calls them - are responsible for most attacks on people.

The hound-hunting ban was passed "presumably to protect cougars," Wielgus says. But it appears to be doing exactly the opposite, and people - and cougars - are paying the price. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Now, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife is seeking public comment on a new game-management plan, which will drive wildlife policy for the next five years. Agency biologist Rich Beausoleil, a predator specialist, believes the new plan will do a better job of managing cougars based on science, not public opinion. Agency officials will have to rethink their assumption that killing cougars can reduce cougar-human conflicts and grapple with the consequences of giving cougar tags to so many hunters.

Heavy hunting is unlikely to reduce cougar-human interactions, Wielgus says, because predator behavior is learned. Removing one problem cat may prove far more effective than expanding general cougar hunting. Still, as long as the state allows hunters to kill cougars for sport, both Beausoleil and Wielgus think bringing back hound hunting might be part of the answer. Wielgus argues that cougars fared far better with hound hunters than with deer and elk hunters, whose sheer numbers and indiscriminate hunting style nearly wiped out the population. Where hound hunters pursue mostly older males - the trophy toms - deer and elk hunters kill far more females, a study by Beausoleil shows, leaving more kittens vulnerable to starvation and predation. With more hunters buying cougar tags each year - over 66,000 were sold in 2007 - Beausoleil says statewide quotas will also be a critical part of the plan.

Convincing the public to accept cougars as an integral part of a healthy landscape is one of the agency's long-term goals, Beausoleil says. Without top predators, the links between different species of an ecological community begin to unravel. Researchers think the loss of cougars and wolves in the East, for example, may have caused the decline of songbirds there. Once hunters killed all the top predators, populations of mid-sized predators like raccoons, foxes, and skunks exploded and, in time, ate all the songbird eggs.

But the benefits of large carnivores are a tough sell among those who view them as threats to life and property. "One of the things we'll never get a handle on is the folks who move to the end of a box canyon in the middle of nowhere, and maybe they come from the city, and they see a cougar and say, 'Hey, I saw a cougar, you've got to remove him,' " Beausoleil says. "Well, no, that's not what we do. You're living in cougar country now." He hopes that one day developers, whose brochures tout the wildflowers, deer and elk in Washington's wild places, will tell people about all the bears and cougars, too.

"People need to make a decision," says Lambert. "Do we want to live with cougars? If so, then we need to make changes in our behavior and accept that they're part of the landscape."

The author is senior science writer and editor for PLoS Biology (www.plosbiology.org), where a version of this story was originally published. She writes from Kensington, California