Forestry and Parks Minister Todd Loewen says Alberta's cougar population has reached about 2,000, while an ideal population is 1,500.
A cougar plays with a piece of wool at the Parque de las Leyendas Zoo, in Lima, Peru, Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2020.
“We definitely don’t want to get into a situation where we over harvest, but we do need to harvest across the broad landscape where the cougars exist.” A spokesperson for Loewen did not immediately respond to a question about when the cougar hunting quota for this season would be published. Last month, Loewen said his ministry had removed trapping limits on fur-bearing animals, like wolverines and lynx, because existing data wasn’t strong enough to justify the limitations.
Luo was critical of that decision as well, saying at the time she thought the government should take a more cautionary approach, as getting a new population estimate should happen before making changes to trapping limits.“I feel like I’m repeating myself,” she said. “It is very, very unusual to allow for hunting in provincial parks,” said Elmeligi, who holds a PhD in interdisciplinary conservation science.“My biologist colleagues and I are extremely dismayed that decades of data is not feeding into decisions about how to manage wildlife populations in Alberta.”
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