The Lone Star State Has Never Counted Its Cougars — That Might Be About to Change
Texas has always done things its own way, and its approach to mountain lions is no exception. While every other Western state with a mountain lion population has some kind of management plan in place, Texas has been running blind for decades. No population estimate. No formal research strategy. No tracking of how many lions are killed each year. For a state that prides itself on strong hunting traditions and fierce independence, it's a surprising gap — and the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department is now trying to close it.
TPWD has put forward a proposal that would require anyone who kills a mountain lion in Texas to report that harvest within 24 hours. The proposal is currently open for public comment through May 27, with a Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission meeting set for May 28 in Austin where the idea will be discussed and where members of the public can also weigh in face to face.
This proposal doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's tied directly to TPWD's newly released 10-year Mountain Lion Research and Monitoring Plan, which the agency is calling its "first formal approach" to actually studying mountain lions and figuring out how many of them are roaming the state. That alone is a telling detail. Texas has been managing — or more accurately, not managing — mountain lions based on essentially zero hard data.
Why Texas Is So Far Behind
To understand why this proposal matters, it helps to understand just how loosely mountain lions have been treated under Texas law. The state classifies them as non-game animals, which means they can be killed at any time, in any number, with no bag limits and no closed season. Landowners can shoot them to protect livestock, hunters can pursue them on private property, and trappers can take them without any requirement to tell anyone about it afterward.
That classification has kept cougars in a kind of regulatory gray zone. Because they aren't game animals, the same rules that govern deer, turkey, or even feral hogs don't apply to them in the same way. And because there's been no required reporting, wildlife managers have had no reliable way of knowing whether Texas has a few thousand mountain lions or far fewer.
The agency's own monitoring plan lays it out plainly. "Texas is the only state with a harvested breeding population of mountain lions where a science-based system for monitoring and estimating mountain lion populations does not exist," the plan's executive summary states. "Accurate, comprehensive data, including harvest, are critical for estimating population trends, modeling sustainability, and informing sound management decisions."
Every other Western state that allows mountain lion hunting already has some form of mandatory harvest reporting on the books. Texas is the outlier, and wildlife managers say that has made their job nearly impossible when it comes to this particular species.
TPWD spokesperson Lerrin Johnson acknowledged that mountain lions have always been a tricky animal to study. "There are several different organizations doing research right now. But historically, with mountain lions being so elusive, they're harder to study and get accurate data for," she said. "This would help us study the population and whether it's stable, how abundant they are, things like that."
What the Proposal Actually Requires
The mechanics of the reporting system are fairly straightforward. Anyone who kills a mountain lion in Texas would have 24 hours to report the harvest through the TPWD website or a smartphone app. They would need to provide the date of the kill, the county where it happened, and the method used to take the animal.
Critically, hunters would not be required to share their personal identifying information or pinpoint the exact location of the harvest. TPWD says all hunter information would remain confidential. That's a detail the agency is clearly emphasizing, likely in an attempt to ease concerns about privacy and government overreach.
Beyond the initial 24-hour report, the proposal also calls for biological samples to be submitted within 60 days of the harvest. Specifically, each harvested mountain lion would need to yield a premolar tooth and a small patch of dry tissue. Hunters could collect these samples themselves or have a wildlife official do it. Those samples would give researchers the kind of biological data that population scientists rely on — age structures, health indicators, and other markers that help build an accurate picture of a species over time.
The idea for mandatory harvest reporting didn't originate inside TPWD headquarters. It came as a recommendation from a Mountain Lion Stakeholder Working Group that was assembled back in 2022. That group included landowners, livestock producers, trappers, and natural resource professionals. It was a broad coalition on paper, though as will be seen, not everyone agrees it represented all the right voices.
The Hunters Who Are Saying No
Not everyone in the Texas hunting community is welcoming this proposal with open arms. Some hunters have been vocal in their opposition, and their concerns go beyond the simple inconvenience of filling out a form.
The Texas Trophy Hunters Association is among the groups that have pushed back. Cable Smith, who hosts the Lone Star Outdoors Show and is a well-known voice in Texas hunting circles, has been particularly outspoken. His objection isn't necessarily about data collection itself — it's about what he thinks the data collection is really designed to do.
"This is the third time in the last four years where they have started negotiating with animal rights activists. Which we never thought would happen in Texas, but it's here," Smith said.
His fear, shared by others in the hunting community, is that mandatory harvest reporting is the first domino in a longer sequence. Once the state has harvest numbers, the argument goes, those numbers can be used to justify tighter regulations — potentially reclassifying mountain lions as game animals, which would open the door to hunting seasons, bag limits, and other restrictions that don't currently exist.
Smith also questioned the practical enforceability of such a system. "The other thing is, they can't enforce mandatory harvest reporting on a non-game species," he said. "What are they gonna do? Coyotes next?" Texas has some enormous ranches — hundreds of thousands of acres in some cases — and the idea of monitoring harvest activity across that kind of terrain, on private land, is a genuine logistical challenge.
He also took issue with the makeup of the stakeholder group that originally recommended the reporting system. According to Smith, hunters were barely represented. "There were only a couple hunters included, and there were like 18 people in this group," he said.
And then there's the question of the monitoring plan's built-in flexibility. One of its guiding principles states that the plan will be "adaptive, whereby TPWD may update actions as needed with new information." Smith reads that as a blank check for the agency to keep moving the goalposts. Whatever the harvest numbers end up showing, he worries it will be used as justification for additional action.
"I don't really have a problem with them getting a number. The problem is, what are they gonna do with it," he said. "If Texans only kill 30 mountain lions, well that means there's not enough lions. Or if Texans kill 300 mountain lions, they might say, 'Well, we're killing too many lions.' Whatever that harvest number is, they're going to beat us over the head with it."
The Bigger Picture Behind the Debate
The tension here reflects a broader friction that has been building in Western states between traditional hunting culture and newer conservation advocacy. Texas isn't the first state to feel it, and it won't be the last.
Smith pointed to a group called Texans for Mountain Lions, which was formed in 2021, as one of the driving forces behind recent changes. That group was among those who pushed for a 2024 regulation that banned the canned hunting of mountain lions in Texas and prohibited keeping a live mountain lion in a trap or snare for longer than 36 hours. That regulation passed unanimously among wildlife commissioners in March 2024. Smith believes the same coalition is now pushing hard for mandatory harvest reporting, and he sees it as part of a coordinated effort.
TPWD, for its part, has been careful to draw a clear line. The agency explicitly states in its monitoring plan that it is not proposing to change the legal status of mountain lions in Texas, and that it has no intention of interfering with landowners' longstanding ability to protect their livestock. Johnson confirmed that the agency hasn't yet gotten a full read on how the broader hunting public is responding to the proposal, since the comment window remains open.
But the framing matters. TPWD is presenting this as a scientific baseline-building exercise — nothing more, nothing less. Opponents are presenting it as a wedge. And the truth is probably somewhere in between, because both things can be simultaneously true: the science really is needed, and the science really could be used in ways that reshape how mountain lions are managed in Texas down the road.
What Happens Next
The public comment period closes May 27. The following day, May 28, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission will take up the issue at its meeting in Austin, where members of the public will have the chance to speak directly before the commission.
Whether the proposal moves forward may depend in part on how loudly the various stakeholders make their voices heard between now and then. Texas has a politically active hunting community, and proposals that touch on hunting rights tend to generate real engagement. At the same time, TPWD has data on its side — the absence of any population information is genuinely hard to defend when every neighboring state has found a way to collect it.
What's clear is that Texas is at a crossroads with mountain lions, and the decisions made over the next few weeks could set the direction for how the state handles these animals for the next decade. Whether that direction preserves the freewheeling status quo or nudges Texas toward something that looks more like what its Western neighbors have been doing for years remains to be seen.
For hunters across the state who have grown accustomed to operating without any oversight when it comes to mountain lions, the message from Austin is unmistakable: the hands-off era may be coming to an end.
