- Joined
- Jan 28, 2003
- Messages
- 13,329
GWARGHOUL
You can feel free to take that anyway you want, it's a free country. The point being however ,that the only people who think the American Mt Lion are a scarce species are the ill educated about wildlife and they tend to be urbanized. We tend to get that out here too with the new comers and the urban idiots who move out of town. Right up until the day they come home and find fluffy has been killed and consumed in their back yard by the scarce and noble Mt Lion. Or they find one sleeping on the back porch. It happens all the time.
They are plentiful all over the inter mountain west in fact they can be a down right PITA sometimes. That does not make them gregarious however and unintended sighting during the daytime are rare. People mistake that for low population. We've also established that they are edible though state game laws do not enforce the salvage of lion meat just like they don't establish the salvage of coyote meat. So I'll ask the question again, do you eat coyotes that you kill?
I've eaten lion but I wouldn't make a second trip into the back country to salvage the meat off of one. I do however take the hides with head and claws attached. They make a very interesting trophy rug.
I don't buy the false morality of if you kill it you have to eat it. There are some animals made for eating and that is why we hunt them there are others that we hunt for others reasons such as conservation issues, population control and depredation issues. The lion falls the second category and happen to be edible but sustenance is not why we hunt the lion.
There are areas of NM and AZ that have 90% Mt sheep lamb mortality due to lion depredation. I worked for as a hunter for an outfit that was contracted by the state of NM to hunt lions in one of those areas back in the 90's. We didn't eat a single cat that we killed. I'm OK with that.
