Study: Hazing with dogs can change cougar behavior

After four years of trying to use dogs to make cougars in northeastern Washington more wary of people, researchers have their conclusion.

It works.

The study, laid out in a paper published last year in the journal Canadian Wildlife Biology and Management, found that cougars that were treed by hounds and shot with paintballs after being approached by humans would flee sooner and farther over multiple trials.

Bart George, a biologist with the Kalispel Tribe of Indians, who led the field work for the study in Spokane and Pend Oreille counties, said that shows the big cats can link the sound of a human voice with a bad outcome.

“We’ve sort of definitively been able to say that cougars can make that connection between this human voice, our presence, and negative interaction,” George said.

The hope is that negative association gives cougars a healthy fear of people, making them less likely to end up in conflict with humans.

But the study acknowledges that while hound pursuit can accomplish that goal, its application is somewhat limited. Even with dogs, it’s all but impossible to get the “avoid people” memo to every cat in the woods.

Instead, the study says hazing with dogs could be used in areas where cougar conflicts are a chronic problem or in response to specific human-cougar run-ins.

Mitchell Parsons, a graduate student at Utah State University and one of the study’s co-authors, said targeting specific cats – such as the one that chased a mountain biker at Riverside State Park in the fall of 2023 – is where hound pursuit shines.

“I think that’s the application where this is really valuable,” Parsons said.

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife estimates there are about 2,400 cougars in the state. Attacks on people are rare. WDFW has recorded two fatal cougar attacks and about 20 that resulted in injuries over the past 100 years.

Still, attacks do happen. In California, a cougar killed a 21-year-old man last March. Last February, one charged a group of five mountain bikers on a trail in Washington’s Cascade Range and injured one of them. In 2022, a cougar injured a girl near Fruitland, Washington.

Cougars that spend time close to people are a higher risk for these sorts of conflicts, which often end with a dead cougar. This study sought a different outcome – instead of killing the cat, change its behavior by giving it a negative association with human voices.

The mechanics of it are simple. George and his team would capture a cougar – usually one that had been reported to them as a potential conflict risk – and fit it with a GPS collar.

Using the GPS data, they could return to that cat over several weeks. Each time, George would approach the cat with a podcast playing on a speaker and see how close he could get before it moved.

After it ran and stopped, he’d release the hounds, which would chase and tree the cat. On the first encounter, the team shot the cats with paintball guns to drive home the point that people should be avoided.

George and his team worked with 41 cougars. They found that after a series of approaches, the average flight initiation distance – or distance between cougar and reasearcher when the cougar fled – increased from 75 meters to 128 meters.

The average distance the cougar ran after it spooked doubled, from 278 meters to 582 meters.

Meanwhile, animals in the control group – which researchers approached multiple times but did not haze – kept letting people get closer and closer. By the fourth approach trial, the average flight initiation distance was about 34 meters, signaling that the cats were getting used to being around people without any consequences.

Getting to within 30 meters of a cat “is more likely to result in a visual encounter that the public may perceive as a safety risk,” the study says.

Most of the animals used in the control portion of the study were hazed with dogs after their initial trials. And, even though they showed little to no fear of people during the control trials, hazing with dogs proved effective in changing their behavior.

Using hounds to chase mountain lions is common in states like Montana and Idaho, where hunters can use hounds to bag cats. Some states also allow the activity beyond the hunting season, letting people use dogs to tree the animals to get photos.

Washington outlawed hound hunting by voter initiative in 1996, but state wildlife officials have continued to use teams of hounds to respond to human-wildlife conflicts.

Without a hunting season, though, there aren’t many hound teams that are around and ready to work at a moment’s notice. In October 2023, the state launched its nonlethal pursuit pass program, which gives people permits to train hounds on predators in the state.

Staci Lehman, a WDFW spokesperson, said 33 applicants have been approved for the permits.