Help protect Utah's cougar population!

The Utah Wildlife Board is voting on September 1st, 2016 to increase the hunting quotas on cougars for the upcoming hunting season.  They will also be voting on a recommendation to create a new hunting unit where unlimited trophy hunting will be allowed.  Please show the Board, through your support of this petition, that you are not in favor of this recommendation. 

Cougars are not hunted for food, they are hunted solely as a trophy animal for a small group of hunters.  Killing them is not a solution to wildlife management and will not magically increase the deer population which is a rationale used to justify this type of hunt.  Hunters represent a small proportion of the state's population.  Roughly 23% of the population are active hunters.  The majority of people in Utah do not hunt and are not in favor of trophy hunting. 

The mission statement of the Utah Wildlife Board is to "serve the people of Utah as trustee and guardian of the state's wildlife".  Throughout its history, the Board has consistently catered to the interests of the hunters and hunting related businesses in the state.  They are not serving the interests of the majority of the people of Utah in the way that they carry out their wildlife management practices.  I am speaking out on this issue as a member of the non-hunting population who believes that trophy hunting is unethical and not justifiable.

There have been no supportable studies on what the actual cougar population is in Utah and there is no justification that more cougars need to be killed.There is strong scientific evidence that refutes the arguement that they need to reduce the cougar population to increase deer herds so that there can be more deer for hunters to kill. 

The best available science on mule deer survival reflects three key points:

Mule deer need adequate nutrition to survive, to reproduce, and bring new members into their population. To obtain this nutrition, mule deer need adequate habitat.
Breeding females (does) must be protected as they are the biological bank account.
Ecological systems are complex. Studies show that killing coyotes, black bears and mountain lions is an expensive strategy that will ultimately fail to address the malnutrition and habitat problems that mule deer face. Killing predators will not magically grow deer herds.

Additional reading: 

Studies such as Hurley et al. (2011) and Bishop et al. (2009) demonstrate that killing native carnivores to increase deer populations is unlikely to produce positive results for herds.
Protecting breeding does and deer herds' access to adequate nutrition is the key factor in maintaining healthy mule deer populations (e.g., Monteith et al. 2014).
Each year, some deer will die no matter what. The question that biologists have studied extensively is whether deer die from predation or some other cause, especially malnutrition.
The scientific consensus is that deer are limited by their food resources ((e.g., Forrester and Wittmer 2013, Monteith et al. 2014). Young animals that have access to fewer nutritional reserves are less likely to survive (Monteith et al. 2014). Mule deer survival is absolutely reliant on deer herds' ability to gain access to adequate nutrition - but that nutrition can be hindered by weather, habitat loss, oil and gas development, fire suppression, and competition with domestic livestock for instance (e.g., Forrester and Wittmer 2013,Monteith et al. 2014).
Comprehensive studies, including those conducted in Colorado (Bishop et al. 2009) and Idaho (Hurley et al. 2011), show that killing native carnivores fails to grow deer herds.
In recent studies that involved predator removal, those removals had no beneficial effect for mule deer (Forrester and Wittmer 2013). If predators had been absent from those ecosystems, the deer would have died from some other cause of mortality anyway (Monteith et al. 2014).
In Colorado, biologists have found that deer are limited by their food quality, especially on winter range (Bishop et al. 2009, Bergman et al. 2014). Biologists found that managing winter range for deer, weed control and reseeding, greatly benefitted deer (Bergman et al. 2014).

If possible, please attend the meeting on September 1st at 9 am at the State Dept. of Natural Resources - 1594 W. North Temple, SLC, Utah to voice your opposition to this vote.