Republican Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte fatally shot a mountain lion on public land north of Yellowstone National Park in December 2021, The Washington Post reported.
Hunting dogs chased the 5-year-old mountain lion up a tree Dec. 28 on U.S. Forest Service land southwest of the town Emigrant, which is about 30 miles from Yellowstone, anonymous residents told The Washington Post. (RELATED: Colorado Man Finds A Mountain Lion Eating An Elk On His Porch)
Hounds chased a Yellowstone National Park mountain lion into a tree. Then Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte shot it. https://t.co/iJmXSBzwMV
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) March 1, 2022
Brooke Stroyke, Gianforte’s press secretary, confirmed to The Washington Post that the governor shot the mountain lion.
“The governor and friends tracked the lion on public lands,” Stroyke told The Washington Post. “As the group got closer to the lion, members of the group, who have a hound training license, used four hounds to tree the lion once the track was discovered in a creek bottom on public land.”
Gianforte “harvested it, and put his tag on it,” Stroyke continued. “He immediately called to report the legal harvest and then the [Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks] game warden. In Livingston, the governor met the game warden who tagged the lion and took the collar.”
Yellowstone biologists had been monitoring the animal with a GPS-tracking collar since December 2019 and National Park Service staff knew it as “M220.”
About 34 to 42 mountain lions reside in Yellowstone per year and are hard to find because of their characteristics and personality. Out of 25 Yellowstone wolves, 19 of them have been killed in Montana in the past 6 months.
“We almost never see a mountain lion,” Nathan Varley, a biologist who leads tours in Yellowstone, told The Washington Post. “They’re just too secretive. They usually only move around at night. They love to hide. They just don’t sit out in the open very much.”
The hunt was deemed legal, but conservationists are still upset by Gianforte’s hunting practices and one particular law that enabled hunters to kill wolves outside Yellowstone, thereby decreasing the wolf population, according to The Washington Post.