Proposed Cat Hunting Ban to Be Added to Colorado’s 2024 General Election Ballot

The Colorado Department of State confirmed on July 31 that anti-hunters have gathered the required number of signatures to add a proposed cat hunting ban on the state’s 2024 general election ballot. Titled Initiative 91, the measure will be put in the hands of voters on Nov. 5 who will have the authority to decide whether to ban the hunting of mountain lions, bobcats and the already federally protected Canadian lynx.

The official word came via a “statement of sufficiency” document issued by the Colorado Department of State attesting to the fact its Elections Division had reviewed a 5 percent random sample of the submitted signatures and had “projected the number of valid signatures to be greater than 110 percent of the total number of signatures required for placement on the ballot.

While CPW is not taking a stand on the proposed cat hunting ban, this ballot initiative is an example of how opposition to legal, regulated hunting not only interferes with Americans’ right to hunt but prevents wildlife managers from carrying out the work entrusted to them.

As shared by this NRA news site last week, the proposed ban comes in spite of the fact Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s (CPW) professional wildlife managers report that the state’s mountain lion populations are increasing and that bobcat numbers in some areas are also on the rise. It also comes amid reports of mountain lions increasingly invading urban and suburban areas of Colorado as tracked by this website as far back as 2019.

Those who favor science-based wildlife management for predator and prey species alike as a vital tool in maintaining America’s wildlife populations also may recall an article on this site from 2023 tracking how lions currently are putting increasing pressure on prey species such as deer. It shared the results of a 2021 CPW collared-lion study documenting that mule deer make up a staggering 66 percent of lion kills, with half of those deer being fawns. The study was covered by multiple news outlets statewide. The article shared one other astounding fact: With an estimated 3,800 to 4,400 mature lions (not counting young lions) statewide, some put estimates of lion predation on deer in the state anywhere from 197,600 to 228,800 deer per year, assuming one per week per lion, with the state’s deer population at the time estimated to be about a half-million deer.

Colorado’s Initiative 91 is an example of what the NRA and other hunter-backed wildlife conservation groups refer to as emotion-based “ballot box biology.” Such initiatives discard the role of a state wildlife agency’s professional wildlife biologists and other wildlife managers who are trained to use science-driven management to keep all wildlife species’ populations at carrying capacity to sustain them as well as their habitats into the future.