New Mexico & El Paso
In October, the New Mexico Game Commission unanimously voted to approve new bear and cougar hunting rules that will be in place for the next four years. Cougar-hunting quotas remain unjustifiably high in 16 of 18 cougar zones. Cougar hunting with dogs is already allowed year-round. Cougars and bears that die outside of hunting either, from depredation complaints or as roadkill, will not be counted against the hunting quotas.
In late spring 2023, New Mexico Game and Fish opened the bear and cougar hunting rules for review as it does every 4 years. The public was invited to provide comments. But the agency only provided a document totaling 1.5 pages that encompassed statements about its proposed black bear (Ursus americanus) and cougar (Puma concolor) rule changes with no specifics about what was being proposed. A few more pages were provided in August with a little more detail about the proposals but very little about the justifications for those proposals. The public has little information about the studies NMDGF relies upon to make population determinations, and no population management objectives (other than implicit hunter satisfaction and future hunting opportunities) have been made public for either species.
October 23, 2023: Mary Katherine Ray is interviewed by Public News Service.
New Mexico’s wildlife management agency is throwing caution to the wind by ignoring sound science and the state’s worsening climate threats, as they call for unsustainable and unjustifiable levels of bear and cougar trophy hunting. Game officials have doubled down on permitting trophy hunters to kill New Mexico’s rare and iconic black bears and cougars—864 black bears and 563 cougars annually—all with the aid of radio-collared hunting hounds—for each of the next four years.
Trapping season will be upon us beginning November 1. While we still are celebrating that the New Mexico Legislature passed and the governor signed Roxy’s Law banning traps from public land, it won’t take effect until April 1, 2022.
Fishermen and river-running enthusiasts in New Mexico are the targets of a stealthy and well-funded campaign to bar recreational access to segments of the Rio Chama and Pecos Rivers, among others, where they cross private land. The principal battleground is the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, where five wealthy private landowners have pending applications for “certificates of non-navigability.” These certificates empower them to outlaw recreational entry to private property via the rivers. The Game Commission has postponed its decision on the new round of non-navigable applications to its regular meeting on August 12.
As we prepare for the 2021 Legislature and the reintroduction of Roxy’s Law to prohibit traps and poisons from public land, already three dogs that have been caught in traps and a gruesome discovery of skinned coyote carcasses are indications of the toll ahead for wildlife and pets as the trapping season is underway.
On Sept. 9, an early cold front stormed into New Mexico from the north, bringing record cold temperatures and freezing rain.
Mexican wolves, the most imperiled canine species in the world, have made progress in the last three months but have also suffered setbacks. In May, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that a record 20 pups were cross-fostered from captive wolves into wild dens. FWS has been using this practice to insert profoundly needed genes from the captive population into the wild. Cross-fostering requires that pups from captivity be within days of the same age as pups in the wild, which means that wolf managers have to move quickly. The genetic bottleneck of the wild population is one of the largest looming threats to wolf recovery.
In 2015, a federal court ordered the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to rewrite its recovery plan for endangered Mexican gray wolves because the existing plan was inadequate to ensure wolf survival. U.S. Fish and Wildlife is taking public comment