WHITE CITY, Ore. — State wildlife biologists have built new welded iron traps to help them catch and kill cougars that have attacked pets or livestock.
Lured by bait, the cougar will walk into the trap door, then go to the back of the screened-in cage. There, it will step on a panel that triggers the door to close behind it. Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife policy is not to release captured cougars, but to kill them humanely. Typically, that means drugging an animal and shooting it.
State biologists used to turn to either agents with trained hounds or federal Wildlife Services agents to track, capture and kill cougars preying on livestock. With this trap, which is being deployed this week, agency biologists say they will be able to quickly respond to a complaint and reduce the likelihood of trapping pets, people and other animals.
The trap measures 10 feet long, 4 feet tall and 40 inches wide, with thick metal screens on each side. Livestock are too big to enter, and smaller animals are too light to trigger the spring-loaded panel.
“There’s no fear of catching someone’s dog or livestock,” said Mark Vargas, an ODFW wildlife biologist. “And it’s a live trap so you can release what you don’t want.”
Vargas said he expected to use the trap primarily at ranches with livestock deaths. In those cases, his planned bait will be the carcass of the animal that the cougar killed and left behind, he said. Often in damage cases, a cougar will return to feed on the animal it killed.
He said the trap will not be set every time a landowner complains of cougars.
“I can’t build enough cougar traps to satisfy everybody,” he said.
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