Decision on bobcat trapping due in May Hefty haul
Whether bobcat trapping becomes legal in Ohio will be decided next month. That’s more than enough time for activists to muster opposition and support.
The eight-member Ohio Wildlife Council is scheduled to vote May 9 on allowing the trapping of 60 bobcats, a species four years removed from threatened status, along with other proposals affecting the 2018-19 hunting/trapping year.
Usually, the council votes on hunting and trapping laws during its April meeting, this year on April 11. But required statewide public hearings, which typically take place in March, will be reprised at 2:30 p.m. April 23 at the Ohio Division of Wildlife’s District One office, 1500 Dublin Road.
The well-attended statewide hearings held in March, it turns out, John Darwin of Iron River, Wis., shows off a 42-inch lake trout he caught in 120 feet of water in Lake Superior near Bayfield, Wis., on Feb. 26. It was one of several lake trout that he and friends caught that day.
weren’t the real deal.
“The date changes are due to some procedural technicalities,” John Windau, a spokesman for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, wrote in an email.
Windau neither confirmed nor denied the “technicalities” involved a failure to publish in newspapers the hunting and trapping proposals within the legislatively mandated timeframe for
public comment before they can become law. Apparently, nobody in the division’s current management team was aware of the rule.
Regardless, the delay gives more time to opponents of bobcat trapping to mount an offensive against approval.
Anti-trapping advocates had urged citizens to register opposition at the wildlife division website and continue to circulate appeals for a policy-influencing turnout during the hearing. Individuals are permitted three minutes to offer views, provided they register by phoning 614-2656304 at least two days before the meeting.
The rhetoric from the anti-trapping side can be poignant and predictable.
“Trapping is an archaic and cruel method of catching furbearing animals,” read an appeal from Big Cat Rescue, a Floridabased organization, one of several national groups involved. “This proposal is not backed by science or in the interest of public safety. It is solely about profit.”
A $5 permit and a $19 hunting license would be required to trap a bobcat, suggesting the wildlife division won’t gain a revenue windfall from legalization. And given the expertise, time and effort required to snare a bobcat and prepare its pelt for auction, any successful trapper’s remunerative rewards seem to be minimal.
“Western bobcats averaged $379, but many did not sell,” the website Trapping Today reported after the North American Fur Auction sale in February. “NAFA didn’t provide an average price for other bobcats, but … there didn’t appear to be much demand.”
A limit of 40 bobcats could be legally trapped in the 11-county Zone C, comprising Coshocton, Muskingum, Morgan, Washington, Monroe, Belmont, Jefferson, Harrison, Tuscarawas, Guernsey and Noble counties. Twenty cats could be taken in 12-county Zone B, comprising Perry, Hocking, Athens, Meigs, Galion, Lawrence, Scioto, Adams, Pike, Ross, Vinton and Jackson counties.
The season would close in each zone as soon as the limit is reached.
Bobcat sightings have increased in recent years, reaching nearly 500 in 2017. In addition, 82 bobcats were killed in 2017 on Ohio roads.
“That’s not a small number,” said Viorel Popescu, assistant professor of biological sciences at Ohio University and supervisor of the school’s Conservation Ecology Lab.
The wildlife division in October gave Popescu’s lab $245,000 to conduct a fouryear study designed to determine the population of bobcats in areas where trapping would be permitted. That the division is requesting a bobcat trapping season before research is completed seems curious and runs against historical precedent.
There also is the matter of whether the public wants or will accept trapping of bobcats, which were wiped out in Ohio in the mid-1800s before starting a comeback in recent decades.
Fueling the antitrapping contingent is a report attributed to Mike Reynolds, the division’s executive administrator of wildlife management and research, which describes the need for further study on bobcat populations and leaves the impression the division believes it’s too early to make a reasonable determination on a trapping season.
However, Reynolds said in an email there has been a misreading of the meaning and context of the document.
“The document referenced was a budget document … and is Popescu’s research proposal submitted for funding,” he said.
In other words, it does not acknowledge the division has concluded a bobcat trapping season in 2018-19 would be premature but is a detailed appeal for a research grant. Reynolds insists that, given data the division already has from its own research, instituting a limited bobcat season is not premature.