Utah Mountain Lion Deep-Dive Briefing

Written By Melody Moser

Prepared by Rod Moser — August 2026

The current laws and what they actually do

HB 125 (2020) requires the DWR director to "take immediate action to reduce the number of predators" in any management unit where big game (mule deer, elk, bighorn, etc.) falls below the established herd-size objective — currently set at over 404,000 statewide. This opened much of the state's cougar range to unlimited, year-round hunting, though permits and two-lion limits still applied in Predator Management units. Sponsors: Rep. Carl Albrecht (R-70) and the late Sen. Ralph Okerlund. Notably, the mandate didn't take effect until May 2025 — which is what triggered the current removal campaign.



HB 469 (2023) was a broad wildlife omnibus bill; cougar language was inserted in the final days of the session by Sen. Scott Sandall (with Rep. Casey Snider as House sponsor), with no meaningful public process. It made cougar hunting year-round statewide, dropped the permit requirement to a basic hunting license, legalized trapping and lethal snares, and removed all bag limits. Any licensed hunter can now kill unlimited mountain lions, 365 days a year. The Mountain Lion Foundation and Western Wildlife Conservancy sued, arguing it violates 2020's Constitutional Amendment E (which requires "reasonable regulation" of hunting and promotion of wildlife conservation). The law remains in effect.



WRI 7707 (launched Oct/Dec 2025) — the DWR/BYU "predator management study." DWR is paying hunters and trappers to remove as many cougars as possible — males, females, mothers, kittens — from six of Utah's 30 units: Wasatch East, Stansbury, Monroe, Boulder, Zion, and Pine Valley. Removals run year-round through 2029, with analysis through 2031. Budget: ~$1.29M, with $150K each from the Utah Wild Sheep Foundation and Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife, and $281K from BYU. DWR's stated goal, per spokesperson Faith Jolley: "remove as many cougars as possible." As of March 2026, 45 lions had been killed. The Wild Sheep Foundation is also reportedly offering a $1,500 bounty for lions taken on specific sheep units. No public comment period was held — DWR says none was required because HB 125 mandates the action.

The Sandall angle

HB 469 didn't start as a cougar bill — it was a public-lands bill, setting aside $1M/year for the state to buy private land for public hunting access. Sen. Scott Sandall inserted the cougar language in the session's final days. On the Senate floor he justified it by claiming "We're getting an increase in our cougar numbers across the state" — while DWR's own biologists showed cougar numbers had been declining for seven years. Corner Post documented how lions became a bargaining chip in the public-lands fight. 

How the votes went — and why legislators went after the cats

HB 125 (2020): House 47–22–6 (Feb 11, 2020); Senate 25–0–4 (Feb 27, 2020). The House vote showed real opposition; the Senate passed it unanimously.



HB 469 (2023): House 57–15–3 (Mar 1, 2023); Senate 21–6 on the cougar amendment. Crucially, the cougar language wasn't in the bill the public saw — Sandall added it on the Senate floor in the session's final days, and it passed the House with "virtually no debate." Legislators voted on an omnibus wildlife-access bill; most never held a hearing on cougars at all. Signed by Gov. Cox March 17, 2023, despite veto requests.



Why they did it: the motivation is political economy, not biology. Mule deer are the crown jewel of Utah's $9.5B outdoor recreation economy, and deer tags fund DWR. When herds decline, sportsmen's groups (SFW, Wild Sheep Foundation, Mule Deer Foundation) — major donors and mobilizers in rural districts — demand action. Habitat restoration is slow, expensive, and invisible; killing predators is cheap, fast, and looks decisive. Sandall justified the amendment by claiming cougar numbers were increasing — while DWR's own data showed seven straight years of decline. The empirical evidence was available and spurned. HB 469's cougar rider also emerged from horse-trading in a public-lands access fight (see the Sandall angle above), meaning Utah's apex predator policy was set as a legislative bargaining chip, not a wildlife management decision.

Why these laws exist

The stated rationale is protecting mule deer and bighorn sheep. Big game hunting is economically and politically powerful in Utah — outdoor recreation generated $9.5B in 2023 — and mule deer herds have been below objective in many units for years. Sportsmen's groups (SFW, Wild Sheep Foundation, Mule Deer Foundation) hold significant sway with the legislature, and the logic sold to lawmakers was simple: fewer lions = more deer.

Why the science says that logic fails

Deer declines are driven by habitat and weather, not lions. At a January 2026 Wildlife Board meeting, DWR's own managers acknowledged most mule deer declines are driven by habitat loss and poor forage quality, not predation. Idaho's landmark large-scale removal study (Hurley et al. 2010) found removing lions had "no strong effect" on mule deer population growth — winter severity dominated, and one harsh winter erased any gains. USU ecologist David Stoner: "What drives deer populations is largely weather."



Lion populations self-limit. Cougars are territorial; density is capped by prey availability and social structure, not by hunting pressure. They don't need human "control" to stay in balance.



Heavy hunting backfires. Washington State University research (Wielgus/Peebles et al., PLOS ONE 2013) found the odds of complaints and livestock depredation increased 36–240% as cougar harvest increased. Killing resident adults — especially older territorial males — triggers immigration of multiple "teenage" males, the age class responsible for most livestock conflict and nearly all attacks on people. Orphaned kittens that survive grow up without learned hunting skills and turn to easy prey: pets and livestock. Boulder is already seeing this in real time — young lions snatching cats off porches and getting stuck under chicken coops after 15 lions (including females) were removed.



The study itself is scientifically weak. It doesn't measure the lion population — only the number killed. There's no control for weather or habitat, the dominant variables. Utah's lion population already fell from ~1,900 (2016) to ~1,100 (2024). Critics — including hunters, houndsmen, and ranchers who've lost stock to lions — call it "an extermination campaign masquerading as science."



Even the affected ranchers object. Andy Rice, a Boulder sheepherder who's lost ~100 sheep to lions: "You kill mothers and have offspring that can't take care of themselves. We are literally seeing the consequences of it in real time."

The CWD case: lions are the deer herd's immune system

This may be the strongest single argument, because it flips the state's own logic. Utah says it's killing lions to save deer — but chronic wasting disease (CWD), the fatal, incurable prion disease spreading through Western deer herds (present in Utah since 2002), is a threat lions actively fight:



  • Lions selectively kill infected deer. Krumm et al. (Biology Letters, 2010, Colorado Front Range): deer killed by mountain lions were dramatically more likely to be CWD-infected than deer shot by hunters in the same area — infected females were 8.5x more likely, males 3.2x. Lions detect and target sick animals humans can't identify.

  • Lions don't get CWD. A Journal of Wildlife Diseases study (2022) found mountain lions resist infection despite years of eating infected prey.

  • Lions destroy prions. An mSphere study (2021) found passage through a lion's digestive system reduces CWD prion infectivity — lions act as dead-end hosts, removing contagious prions from the landscape instead of leaving them to leach into soil from rotting carcasses (where they persist for years and infect more deer).



No hunter, no agency, no budget can do what lions do for free: find the sick deer, remove them before they spread the disease, and neutralize the prions. Utah is spending $1.29M to eliminate the deer herd's only natural disease-control system — in the name of saving deer.



How bad is CWD in Utah right now? Early-stage but accelerating — and that timing is the whole argument. Since first detection in 2002, Utah has confirmed 435 positive mule deer and 11 elk. But 83 of those positives came in the 2025–26 season alone (July 2025–Feb 2026, from ~2,126 samples), and the disease keeps reaching new ground: first-ever detections near Scofield (Carbon County) and in the Little Mountain/Pine Ridge/Dry Fork areas of Uintah County in 2025–26. DWR is concerned enough that it's imposing its first-ever mandatory CWD testing on the Ogden unit's 2026 buck hunt.



Compare Wyoming and Colorado, where some herds run 20–40% prevalence and are in long-term decline. Utah's statewide prevalence is still low — DWR's sampling is designed to detect prevalence of just 1%. That's exactly the stage where predator "cleansing" matters most: while infected animals are still rare enough for lions to find and remove them before the disease entrenches in soil and herds. Utah has a closing window to avoid becoming Wyoming — and it's spending the window killing the one animal that patrols for the disease.


The ecosystem case: what happens when you remove an apex predator

The ocean already ran this experiment. When overfishing removed great sharks off the U.S. Atlantic coast, their prey (cownose rays) exploded, and the rays wiped out a century-old bay scallop fishery (Myers et al., Science, 2007). Killing the top predator collapsed an industry two levels down the food chain.


On land the pattern is the same, and it's called a trophic cascade:


  • Yellowstone (subtraction, then addition): wolves eradicated → elk overbrowsed willows and aspen for 70 years → streambanks eroded, beavers and songbirds vanished. After 1995 reintroduction, a 20-year study documented a ~1,500% increase in willow crown volume, with beavers and riparian habitat recovering.

  • Mesopredator release: remove the top predator and mid-sized predators explode. In Utah, fewer lions likely means more coyotes — and coyotes are a major killer of the mule deer fawns the state claims to be protecting. The cull can backfire on its own goal.

  • Lions feed the mountain: research by Panthera found a single cougar kill feeds hundreds of species — beetles, birds, foxes, bears — making lions among the most important "ecosystem engineers" in the West. One study estimated 485 species benefit from cougar kills.

  • Deer themselves suffer: without predation pressure, deer overbrowse winter range (worsening the habitat problem DWR admits is the real driver), congregate in ways that spread CWD faster, and collide with cars. Gilbert et al. (2016) estimated cougar presence in the eastern U.S. would prevent 155 human deaths and $2.3B in collision costs over 30 years.


Utah has ~1,100 lions left, being removed without population monitoring. The shark lesson: by the time the cascade is visible, the damage is done.

What better management looks like

  1. Science-based quotas by unit — harvest limits tied to actual population monitoring (Montana's approach: integrated population models, regular monitoring, adjusted quotas), not unlimited take with no population data.

  2. Protect the social structure — limit harvest of adult females and resident territorial males; Washington caps harvest at ~12–16% per unit based on this research.

  3. Target problem individuals, not populations — remove specific lions confirmed in livestock conflicts rather than blanket culls.

  4. Fix the actual problem — invest the $1.29M in habitat: winter range restoration, migration corridors, water, cheatgrass/pinyon-juniper treatment. DWR's own Watershed Restoration Initiative exists to do exactly this.

  5. Coexistence infrastructure — range riders, guard dogs, secure enclosures; compensation programs for verified losses.

  6. Restore public process — wildlife policy set through the Wildlife Board and RACs with public comment, not last-minute legislative insertions.

Key talking points (quick recall)

  • Utah is the only state with unlimited, year-round hunting and trapping of mountain lions with just a general license.

  • Lion population dropped ~40% (1,900 → 1,100) even before the removal study began.

  • DWR's own staff admit habitat, not predation, drives deer declines.

  • More killing = more conflict (WSU: complaints up 36–240% with increased harvest).

  • The study kills mothers and kittens, counts only carcasses, and had no public comment.

  • Opposition includes hunters, houndsmen, and ranchers — this isn't anti-hunting, it's pro-science.

  • Lions are the deer herd's immune system: they selectively kill CWD-infected deer (8.5x selection rate), can't catch the disease, and destroy the prions. Utah is killing its only natural CWD defense.

  • CWD is in Utah and spreading: 435 deer and 11 elk confirmed since 2002, 83 positives this season alone, new areas confirmed every year, and DWR's first mandatory testing starts in 2026. Utah's prevalence is still low — which is exactly when lion predation can still stop it. Wyoming and Colorado (20–40% in some herds) show where this goes.

  • We've seen this movie: kill the sharks, lose the scallops. Kill the wolves, lose the willows and beavers. Apex predator removal cascades through the whole ecosystem — and by the time you see it, it's done.

  • Fewer lions likely means more coyotes — which kill more fawns. The cull can backfire on the very deer it claims to protect.

Sources


Melody Moser https://www.MoserGroupUtah.com
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