(Editor’s note: The mountain lion hunting ban appears on the Colorado ballot as Proposition 127.)
DENVER– Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s office on Wednesday announced that a citizen-initiated measure to outlaw the hunting of mountain lions, along with lynx and bobcat, will appear on the statewide ballot as part of Colorado’s November 5, 2024 general election.
A random sampling of the over 187, 000 signatures submitted by proponents projected a validity rate of more than 110 percent of the number required to qualify for the ballot, according to a July 31 media release, thus precluding the work of validating each individual signature. The current signature requirement for statewide initiatives is 124, 238.
Currently numbered as Initiative 91, the ballot measure purports to ban the practice of “trophy hunting,” which generally means killing an animal for sport and not for consumption or harvest. However, the initiative goes on to broadly define trophy hunting as “intentional killing, wounding, pursuing or entrapping of a mountain lion, bobcat or lynx,” which in practice means a ban on hunting the animals entirely, according to Dan Gates from Coloradans for Responsible wildlife Management, a pro-hunting group that opposes the measure.
“They say they want to curtail trophy hunting, but the definition in the petition says ‘intentional killing,’” Gates previously said. “All of hunting is intentional killing. If they are going to classify that hunting as intentional killing, how can they not be for getting rid of all forms of hunting?”
In Colorado, the hunting of mountain lions, which runs yearly from November to March (with additional hunting in April if needed) is already prohibited unless the meat of the animal is harvested for consumption. In other words, lion hunting just for the taking of a trophy is already illegal.
Lynx are already protected by both state and federal law, with hunting and trapping prohibited.
As previously reported by Complete Colorado, the Colorado Wildlife Conservation Project (CWCP), a broad-based coalition of hunting, fishing and conservation groups has come out against the measure, calling the effort a threat to science-based wildlife management in Colorado.
The measure is a statutory change, meaning that it needs fifty percent-plus-one of the vote to pass, and can be amended by the legislature, as with any other state law.