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Indiana bobcat trapping season gets final approval

By Clayton Baumgarth

Posted March 19, 2025

A bobcat sighted on a trailcam. (Courtesy, Sycamore Land Trust)

Indiana’s Natural Resources Commission approved a bobcat trapping season in 40 southern Indiana counties Tuesday.

The season will run from Nov. 8 to Jan. 31 and will allow licensed trappers to harvest one bobcat a year, to a statewide maximum of 250 bobcats. Cage traps, snares, and foothold traps are permitted for use.

Nick Erny with the Indiana State Trappers Association said the new rules were adopted as written even after the NRC received nearly 3000 public comments on the matter.

“I mean, there's a lot of us super excited about it. We've been having to release these animals for years,” he said.

State lawmakers mandated in 2024 that the Department of Natural Resources establish rules for a bobcat trapping season by July of this year. Many public commenters hoped that the statewide bag limit would be zero.

Though the DNR said the current bobcat population is sufficient to prevent threats of extinction, critics argue there enough evidence.

Samantha Chapman, Indiana state director at Humane World for Animals (formerly called the Humane Society of the United States), said in a statement:

“The Natural Resources Commission’s decision to greenlight the trapping and killing of 250 of Indiana’s recovering bobcats — when there is still no adequate population data and no scientific evidence to justify killing hundreds of bobcats — contradicts ethical and science-based wildlife conservation. This instead favors a tiny special interest group who wish to profit off Indiana’s wildlife by selling bobcat furs to overseas markets.”

Erny said that once the season starts, the true picture of how large the state’s bobcat population will come into focus.

“(Trapping) is a very effective way to collect the data,” Erny said. “Whether it's reproduction, food sources, you know, just actual counts where the population truly lies the heaviest, this is the simplest way to collect accurate data.”

Erny also believes that the population numbers are so high that in a couple years, the bag limit will be raised.