KOA Headlines
10 07 24 Samantha Miller with Cats Aren’t Trophies campaign opposition to Prop 127
What if there was a day when we could come together to give to the causes we're most passionate about? Great news! There is! December 10th is Colorado Gives Day, and it's easily the best day to give. All the causes you care about are in one place, so let's start a wave of generosity across the state. Join us in lifting up our local communities. Give now through December 10th at ColoradoGivesDay.org. If you put aside 25 cents every week for a year, what could you get at the end? A few cups of coffee maybe? A candle? Or you could get a year of the best reporting from all over the world. Go to washingtonpost.com/bf24 right now. You'll get a Washington Post subscription for 25 cents a week for your first year. This is a Black Friday sale, so it won't last long. It's beginning to sound a lot like the holidays. The Roku Channel, your home for free and premium TV, is giving you access to holiday music and genre-based stations from iHeart all for free. Find the soundtrack of the season with channels like iHeartChristmas and North Pole Radio. The Roku Channel is available on all Roku devices, web, Amazon Fire TV, Google TV, Samsung TVs, and the Roku mobile app on iOS and Android devices. So stream what you love and turn up the cheer with iHeartRadio on the Roku Channel. Happy streaming! Big Cat Hunting could become a thing of the past, and our state would be the option to ban the practice coming to voters this election cycle. Revert to on the ballot as Proposition 127 had passed, it would ban the hunting of animals like mountain lions and bobcats in the state, joining us now from the Cats Are Not Trophies, a pro prop 127 organization on the KOA common spirit health hotline. It's Samantha Miller. Samantha, good morning. Glad to have you on Colorado's Morning News. What is your main reason for advocating for this and being for this? Well, right now in Colorado, mountain lions and bobcats can be hunted with packs of up to eight dogs, which is really cruel and inhumane. Those dogs can tree a cat or corner it, and then a hunter just walks up and shoot it. Shoot it, which is contrary to fair chase principles. So to us, it's cruel. It's inhumane. It has no place in Colorado. Bobcats can also be trapped. Anyone trapper can trap an unlimited number of bobcats in our state. So what we say is, hey, cats can self-regulate. They can maintain their own populations, and we don't need to participate in this cruel and inhumane activity. What would you say to the opponents who claim that wildlife management decisions should be made by the biologists, the environmentalists who are working with Colorado Parks and Wildlife and not by the voters when it comes to experience in passing this? Well, what I would say is that the voters are able to make a decision about animal cruelty, and then Colorado Parks and Wildlife would continue to manage mountain lions and bobcats as they always have. And our measure does leave in place exemption for any animals involved in conflict with people, pets, or livestock. Samantha, is your biggest issue about how they're hunted, or about just the hunting in general? I hear you talk about packs of dogs. Do you think that's the cruel piece of it or that they are being maintained, if you will, by wildlife experts? No, so I think that this still allows them to be maintained by wildlife experts, but what it does is it removes that recreational hunting piece. So animals can still be killed if they're involved in conflict, just like they can be now. But what we're saying is that the recreational trophy hunting and fur trapping of mountain lions and bobcats really doesn't belong in Colorado. So it's relic of predator hunting past and not part of Colorado's ethical hunting today. When we spoke with Colorado Parks and Wildlife earlier this morning, they talked a little bit about the process it takes to obtain one of these licenses. And they said that a lot of the money from, or all the money that goes from those licenses purchased directly impacts Colorado Parks and Wildlife in their efforts to manage the species. So the back and forth of the economic impact, what would be your main response to that? Well, I think that the money from licenses for mountain lions and bobcats is just a little over $400,000. It's a drop in the bucket of Colorado Parks and Wildlife's revenue. Colorado Parks and Wildlife receives revenue in a variety of ways. And what this does is it empowers Colorado Parks and Wildlife to manage mountain lions and bobcats for their ecosystem benefits rather than for recreational trophy hunting. Do you have any data about the hunting that goes on with the big cats and what is considered and what is trophy hunting and what isn't? I don't know if there's any data that's available to that. So what we consider trophy hunting is that the primary purpose of the hunt is the trophy. It's to take a photo with that animal and then to mount that animal on the wall or to sell its fur. A lot of folks don't know that in Colorado every year we have an annual fur auction and bobcat furs are sold there and those furs end up in markets in China and in Russia. Do we have other states that already have a ban on mountain lions and bobcat hunting and what has the overall results been if they do have a ban similar? So California already has a ban on mountain lion and bobcat hunting and those populations are stable and their conflicts are way down. If we look at California just last year they only killed 15 mountain lions for conflict and in Colorado we're killing over 60 every year right now and that's in addition to the 500 mountain lions we kill each year just for recreation. And Samantha who's all funding what you're doing and I'm not ascribing anything here but a lot of times these propositions and things are funded by out of state. Is this all local funding? Yeah you know the interesting thing is that our opposition is mostly funded by out of state trophy hunting groups like Safari Club International and our greatest funder is the wild animal sanctuary right in Colorado and we have more donations from Coloradans than our opposition does. So this is very much a grassroots effort. It was started by 900 volunteers statewide. I myself live in Grand Lake. We have volunteers in Grand Junction, Durango, Fort Collins and everywhere in between. So it's really been a grassroots effort here in Colorado. Samantha in wrapping up with you if this bill does pass how would it work? Would hunters face a fine if they continue to hunt or what would the process look like going forward? Yeah the hunters would face a fine and they could face a misdemeanor charge if they were to poach cats at that point because it would be illegal to recreationally harvest these animals. But what would still be illegal would be to kill any mountain lion or bobcat involved in conflict with people, pets or livestock. From the organization cats are not trophies. We have a pro proposition 127 organization Samantha Miller. Thank you. Thank you. What if there was a day when we could come together to give to the causes we're most passionate about? Great news! There is! December 10th is Colorado Gives Day and it's easily the best day to give. All the causes you care about are in one place. So let's start a wave of generosity across the state. Join us in lifting up our local communities. Give now through December 10th at ColoradoGivesDay.org. If you put aside 25 cents every week for a year, what could you get at the end? A few cups of coffee maybe? A candle? Or you could get a year of the best reporting from all over the world. Go to washingtonpost.com/bf24 right now. You'll get a Washington Post subscription for 25 cents a week for your first year. This is a Black Friday sale so it won't last long. Washington Post.com/bf24 It's beginning to sound a lot like the holidays. The Roku Channel, your home for free and premium TV, is giving you access to holiday music and genre-based stations from iHeart all for free. Find the soundtrack of the season with channels like iHeartChristmas and North Pole Radio. The Roku Channel is available on all Roku devices, web, Amazon Fire TV, Google TV, Samsung TVs, and the Roku Mobile app. Roku Mobile app on iOS and Android devices. So stream what you love and turn up the cheer with iHeartRadio on the Roku Channel. Happy streaming!