Brian Hergert’s hunting hounds Tracker, left, and Maisie, respond instantly to his call of “cat, cat,” on Jan. 13, 2022.

WALLA WALLLA — On a cold January morning, the snow from a recent storm largely melted, Brian Hergert sat inside the living room of his cozy Walla Walla home, surrounded by houseplants in every corner and furnishings he’s fashioned out of antlers and animal hides.

In a few hours, he would be headed to his property out in the country, ready to be back in nature after staying home for a few days. Outside, two coonhounds, Maisie and Tracker, howl at newcomers and passing cats before curling up again for a nap inside their chain-link kennel.

An avid hunter, Hergert has been running hounds since the early ‘80s. Before the practice was largely banned by voters more than a decade later, his hounds often helped him hunt big game predators, including cougars, in the Blue Mountains.

“We used to take, in a good year, I’d kill six, seven cats,” Hergert said. “It was nothing to take out 40, 50 cats out of the Blues from here to Dayton between me and my friends.”

In 1996, however, Washington state joined Oregon in outlawing the use of hounds to hunt or pursue black bear, cougars or bobcats, with some exceptions. On a wall in a nearby hallway, Hergert has hung several photos from that year commemorating the last recreational hunt of cougars with his hounds.

That initiative, which also largely criminalized the use of bait to attract black bears, was approved by Washington voters by a comfortable margin, marking what many saw as a sea change for hunters in the state.

Management of large predators has remained politically contentious in the decades since, often flared by increased human-cougar interactions, livestock predation and rare but high-profile fatal attacks.

But recently, debate over what to do with cougars in the Blue Mountains in particular has increased for a different reason: dwindling elk populations.

The Blue Mountain elk herd is estimated to consist of around 3,500 animals, according to reporting by the Lewiston Tribune, well below the population objective of 5,500 currently set by the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife.

The herd’s calves also often are not surviving to maturity.

A 2021 study by the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife monitored 125 elk calves with radio collars — by mid-November, only 11 still were known to be alive. While a number of factors such as a recent harsh winter and drought have contributed to the high mortality rate, cougars are believed to have accounted for 54 of those deaths.

While some have called for reducing elk hunting in the area to protect the herd, the study’s findings have prompted calls to extend cougar-hunting season in the Blue Mountains as well as for the Fish & Wildlife to use hounds to hunt the big cats for management purposes, which is allowed under the 1996 law.

For Hergert, calls to increase cougar hunting are long overdue.

Hergert’s hounds

While the veteran hunter has owned as many as six hunting dogs at one time, these days he just keeps the two: a redtick-treeing walker mix named Maisie, and a redtick-bluetick mix named Tracker.

Hergert grew up hunting birds with his dad and brother, and when he began using hounds, he started with small game. He had permission to run his dogs through the ditches alongside farm ground out near Waitsburg and elsewhere, chasing down raccoons.

“But they’re just kind of greasy, stinky deals,” Hergert said. “But big cats, they’re good eating.”

It wasn’t long before Hergert began training hounds to chase down bobcats and cougars. And if friends who hunted big cats were only interested in the pelt, he’d take the meat and trim it down with the help of a butcher his father worked with as a high schooler.

When Hergert first started hunting cougars, anyone could simply purchase the proper hunting license and tag and could use hounds during the hunt, he said. Later, the state used a lottery system to allocate cougar tags, and Hergert’s name had to be drawn for him to be able to harvest a cougar.

Or, as often as not, another hunter whose name was drawn that year would reach out to Hergert, knowing that he had trained hunting hounds that needed to keep their skills sharp.

“I met a lot of my friends now that way,” he said.

Once his hounds found a cougar’s trail and chased it, the cougar would typically climb up into a tree to try to escape, unable to maintain fast speeds at long distances. While Hergert caught up with his dogs, their baying at the bottom of the tree kept the cougar from being able to flee again.

If Hergert was still training a dog and wanted to give it more practice, he would often prolong a hunt, he said.

“A lot of times you can jump them and run them again, once you get them treed, to train dogs,” Hergert said. “It’s really a kick, but you can take a bigger branch and beat on the trunk of a tree, and the vibrations go up and nine times out of 10 they jump.”

While the 1996 initiative to ban the use of hounds for hunting cougars and other large predators ended the recreational sport, it didn’t end the hunt altogether.

The law provided for a number of exceptions, including for population management or to kill an animal that had attacked livestock or threatened public safety, though hunters generally need authorization from the state.

For years, Hergert volunteered himself and his hounds for the management program, though disagreements with the local managers of cougar removal eventually led him to stop.

And in recent years, the elk that he hunts have become more inaccessible.

“There were 28 rifle-hunting permits available for bull elk in 2018,” Hergert said.

“Now there’s one permit for rifle and one permit for archery, for the whole area. It’s really that bad,” he continued.

Now, to save the elk populations and to increase opportunities for area hunters, Hergert argues, restrictions on hunting cougars need to be relaxed.

But while Hergert and other individual hunters are not the only ones calling for cougar hunting guidelines to be relaxed in the face of high elk calf predation, it is not a proposal without political challenges and controversy.

Political divide

In a Dec. 27 letter to the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife, the Walla Walla County commissioners requested that cougar-hunting season remain open until March 31 “to allow as many cougars as possible be removed from our Blue Mountains.”

Commissioners from Asotin, Columbia and Garfield counties have reportedly written similar petitions to the agency.

Hunters can take cougars without the use of hounds from Sept. 1 to Dec. 31, with a late season running until the end of March if hunting quotas aren’t met by the new year.

Anyone with a hunting license and a cougar tag can hunt the animal in three specific areas within the Blue Mountains. For each of those managed zones, guidelines allow for 12-16% of the local population to be hunted, ranging from five to nine animals depending on the area.

This guideline is set to maintain current cougar populations in each zone and is based on intensive research by Fish & Wildlife, said Steve Pozzanghera, Region 1 director for the department’s Eastern Region.

But with the normal cougar season already over and the late season ending at the end of March, each of those three managed zones are well below the 12-16% guideline. In part, Hergert attributes this shortfall to the difficulty of hunting cougars without hounds.

This under-harvest of cougars, alongside the recent study of elk calf mortality, has prompted some at the state to consider other management options, Pozzanghera said. Hounds could potentially be used to cut back local cougar populations, he added, though additional research is required to prove that the big cats are a limiting factor for the elk population.

And as with other large, charismatic animals, the fight over the future of cougar hunting continues to rage on.

Department of Fish & Wildlife commissioners have reportedly been at odds over the correct approach to take, with some calling for loosening cougar hunting guidelines and others arguing that the state’s objective of 5,500 elk is too high and that elk hunting should be limited.

A 2020 study authored by John Laundré, a biologist at Western Oregon University, also calls into question whether sport hunting serves as an effective management tool for cougars.

That study compared cougar populations in California, the only western state without any legal sport hunting of the big cat, to those of 10 other western states, finding similar rates of cougar-human encounters in all 11 states.

Conversely, a 2013 study from Washington State University’s Large Carnivore Conservation Laboratory found that increased hunting actually correlated with more attacks on livestock and people.

Populations of cougars that experienced more hunting tended to be younger, and younger, more aggressive males tended to crowd more densely into overlapping territory, increasing the likelihood of attacks, researchers found.

The state Department of Fish & Wildlife has also reversed its decisions to loosen guidelines in the past due to political push back. In 2015, after coming under pressure from Gov. Jay Inslee, the agency dropped maximum cougar harvest rates from 17-21% back down to their current 12-16% limits.

A bill prefiled in the Washington state Senate on Dec. 29, 2021, would further restrict exceptions to the 1996 law banning hounds in cougar hunting, in response to accusations that Klickitat County Sheriff Bob Songer has misused exceptions to the law to hunt cougars for sport.

The 1996 initiative allowed county, state or federal agencies to use hounds to hunt cougars or other predators that pose a risk to public safety. Under SB 5613, sheriff’s offices could not use hunting hounds for that purpose without direct authorization from the state Department of Fish & Wildlife.

“If an animal poses a clear threat to public safety or property, there’s no question it must be dealt with,” wrote the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Kevin Van De Wege, D-Sequim, in a Jan. 18 press release.

“But there’s a big difference between protecting the public and citing public safety as an excuse to justify sport hunting.”

In an interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting, Songer said he was fulfilling his duty to respond to calls from the public about increased cougar sightings and multiple livestock deaths.

“You’ll have people telling you, ‘It’s just cats traveling through the county. It’s no harm to humans or livestock.’ That’s a bunch of B.S.,” Songer told OPB.

Ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog

Cougar hunt or no, Hergert regularly practices with his dogs, tapping a branch partway up a tree and calling out, “Cat! Cat, cat!”

Hergert’s coonhounds leap to attention, baying and howling while jumping up at the tree’s base.

“It’s funny how it’s bred into them, and sometimes you get real good ones,” he said.

“I mean they’re all good,” he added after a moment. “Some of them take longer to get going, like starting your Harley.”

His first hunting dog was given to him by friend and local hunter Steve Drumheller, Hergert said. After she died of an infection from a raccoon bite, Hergert began taking in and training rejected hounds from out-of-town hunters.

“A 6-month-old dog, if it wasn’t hunting for them, they were ready to shoot it,” he said.

“They might take three years or something before they figured out how to hunt, but shooting the dog — I’ve taken in a lot of dogs like that. And they’ve always worked out sooner or later.”