FRANKFORT — Regulations to expand bobcat hunting, including at night with thermal equipment, moved forward Tuesday, despite bipartisan concern from some lawmakers about the status of Kentucky’s bobcat regulation.
The state legislature’s Administrative Regulation Review Subcommittee has the authority to vote to declare a regulation as “deficient” if lawmakers disapprove of it or recommend changes to a regulation. The committee Tuesday took neither action on regulations proposed by the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources.
Sen. Steve West, R-Paris, a co-chair of the committee, told the Lantern lawmakers decided to defer to the department’s decisionmaking with the understanding that “if there’s some type of impending doom with a collapse of the bobcat population” the department can come back to lawmakers with revised proposals.
“Anecdotally across the state if you talk to hunters, the bobcat population seems to be pretty strong,” West said. “If we felt that there was harm to the overall population, or that they were endangered in any way, or things of that nature, we probably would have acted, but the members of the committee didn’t feel that way today.”
The proposed regulations from the wildlife management agency would expand the bag limit — the number of bobcats that a hunter or trapper can kill during a season — from five to 10 bobcats and allow, for the first time, a hunter to kill one bobcat at night. The Kentucky Fish and Wildlife Commission, a volunteer board that votes on hunting regulations, approved the bag limit expansion last year and approved the nighttime hunting of bobcats in June.
But two Louisville lawmakers on the committee echoed concerns from the state’s own wildlife biologists, trappers and some members of the Fish and Wildlife Commission about increasing opportunities to kill bobcats while not having solid population data on bobcats.
“It’s curious to me that we would hunt something that was not overpopulated, that we don’t have a definite number of them in the state, and that it seems to me that we have biologists that are not in lockstep on this,” said Sen. Julie Raque Adams, R-Louisville. “It would be my opinion that we would have more of a unified opinion on this before we tackle this issue. But that’s just my opinion.”
In May, the department’s director of wildlife and the manager of the state’s furbearer program told the Fish and Wildlife Commission they haven’t been able to get adequate tooth samples from hunters and trappers to estimate the state’s bobcat population, along with having concerns over the safety of nighttime hunting. The chief executive of the department, Commissioner Rich Storm, worked with a powerful state lawmaker to legalize the nighttime hunting of bobcats through the passage of a last-minute bill, Senate Bill 39, during this year’s legislative session. The department’s deputy commissioner Gabe Jenkins told the Fish and Wildlife Commission it was the “intention” of Senate Bill 39 that the board move forward with regulations for hunting bobcats at night.
Rep. Mary Lou Marzian, D-Louisville, told department representatives she was concerned that people could wipe out bobcats and that “it’ll be another species that’s going to be gone forever in Kentucky.”
Todd Blevins, the state director of the animal welfare and protection group Humane World for Animals, also told the committee it would be a risk to expand the bag limit for bobcats and allow the nighttime hunting of bobcats when “we simply just don’t have the numbers.”
“You’re not going to find the trappers and organizations like mine on the same page very often. But when you do, I think that tells you that there’s something wrong with the policy,” Blevins said.
But representatives for the department defended the decisions to move forward with the bobcat hunting expansion. Jenny Gilbert, the legislative liaison for the department, said there had been requests to “increase the harvest” of bobcats before this year’s legislative session.
She also said the department and commission took “the most conservative approach” to complying with changes to state law. Despite the increase in the bag limit to 10 bobcats, the proposed regulations limit hunters to only killing one bobcat at night during the season. Hunters can kill only three bobcats out of the 10 overall, both daytime and nighttime hunting, Hunters are allowed to kill the remaining bobcats in their bag limit with other weapons such as bows or traps.
Benjamin Monarch, the general counsel for the department, said “the process of informing our decisions is one of methodology that we take very seriously and is very comprehensive.”
“Does that mean that you’re always going to have perfect information? Certainly not.” Monarch said. “We do the best we can to gather data and extrapolate from that data to make reasonable conclusions.”
West told the Lantern that wildlife management issues get “very complicated” and “there’s a constant struggle” over hunting seasons with various interested groups.
“We have to call balls and strikes and just be an umpire, and that was our call today on this one,” West said.
The proposed regulations will now go before the Interim Kentucky Natural Resources and Energy Committee, where lawmakers on that committee will consider the regulations before becoming finalized. The department will also hold a Sept. 30 hearing collecting public comments on the regulation allowing the nighttime hunting of bobcats at its department headquarters.
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