Her radio tag told us that F-91 was on Hardscrabble Ridge near her den. A week earlier, she’d run off the Hornocker Wildlife Research Institute’s Ken Logan and his assistant. No large carnivore is less dangerous to humans than the cougar, but females lose timidity when you chase their cubs.

Two military cops accompanied us to make sure I didn’t photograph anything secret in New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range. F-91 didn’t like those odds and only circled us. When I held her three spotted, blue-eyed cubs, they hissed, growled and bit me. And when Logan tattooed their ears, they screamed. F-91 was furious and told us so.

I loved cougars before that day (July 18, 1994), even more since. But I’m a former state game and fish bureaucrat, so emotion doesn’t influence my assessment of issues like next November’s ballot initiative to ban cougar hunting in Colorado.

The best wildlife management is designed by trained professionals. But ballot initiatives can be necessary, especially when lay-populated wildlife commissions do the designing.

Example: For years, Colorado’s wildlife commissioners insisted on letting hunters bait bears with garbage, a practice anathema to ethical hunters and wildlife professionals. No “thrill of the chase” if there’s no chase. The loudest critic was Colorado’s then-bear biologist Tom Beck. “There’s no sport in knocking off a bear with its head in a bucket of old jelly donuts,” he told me. A 1992 ballot initiative banned “garbaging for bears.”

As a hunter, I defend hunting but not predator hunting. Predators aren’t made like other game. They can’t compensate for mortality with fecundity. And ethical hunters always eat what they kill. Predator hunters don’t. Colorado requires cougars to “be properly prepared for human consumption.” That reg is pure PR, unenforceable and generally ignored. On online forums, cougar hunters have posted: “I feed them to my hounds” and “Who would eat cougar?”

Do Colorado’s cougars require management? I put the question to two veteran cougar researchers — Colorado State University wildlife professor Dr. Barry Noon and Dr. Mark Elbroch, director of Panthera’s Puma Program.

Noon said: “Because of human conflicts, management would be defensible, if there were reliable monitoring data showing a stable or increasing population. I’m not aware of any.”

And this from Elbroch: “Human encroachment does require cougar management. But management to many game and fish agencies is killing things. Cougars don’t need to be killed. No problem is solved by killing them.”

Nonlethal management options abound. Elbroch recommends requiring people to bring animals in at night, providing financial assistance to farmers to help them fence livestock and acquire guard dogs, protecting large blocks of land to prevent cougar-human conflicts, and teaching people what to do if confronted by a cougar. “Cougars are super curious and super cautious,” he says. “There’s little chance of attack if you stand straight, yell, clap your hands and advance.”

Elbroch recommends nonlethal hounding. After Washington banned all cougar hounding, legislators realized their mistake. Hounding teaches problem cats to avoid human habitations. So now houndsmen get licenses for a “nonlethal pursuit season.”

Among the strongest critics of cougar killing are houndsmen who engage in what they call “Catch and release hunting.” The entire sport is training hounds, running hounds and treeing or cornering the cat. After that, Elmer Fudd could do the shooting.

I asked veteran cougar researcher Dr. Rick Hopkins, board president of the Cougar Fund, what science supports Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s claim that cougar hunting is necessary to create more mule deer. “None,” he replied. “For years agencies have made such claims, but when pushed to provide evidence, they can’t.” Predator control has never worked anywhere.

Cougars originally populated all contiguous states. By the early 20th century, they’d been virtually extirpated by bounties and government control. Now they’re gradually repopulating, breeding as far east as Nebraska. That’s a reason not to kill them.

Cougars belong to all Americans, not just the very few people who hunt them. Killing cougars for recreation is abhorrent to most Americans — including 80.6 percent of Coloradans, according to a 2023 Colorado State University survey.

“Heeps of science show the beneficial contributions of cougars,” declared Elbroch. “Humans are healthier when we live with cougars.”

Ted Williams is a former information officer for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife.