A bobcat sighted on a trail cam. (Courtesy, Sycamore Land Trust)
Bobcats, the only resident native wild cats in Indiana, have had a population resurgence since being placed on the endangered species list in 1969.
Though they’ve been spotted as far north as St. Joseph County, they’re most common in the southernmost portion of the state. where Indiana meets Kentucky.
It’s there that trappers like Nick Erny from Indiana can go to get bobcat pelts legally.
“In the state of Kentucky, you are allowed five Bobcats per season, per license,” he said while showing his shop of traps and pelts in Holland, Indiana. “Three of them can be hunted, but all five can be trapped.”
A new rule being considered by the DNR would enable a bobcat trapping season in 40 southern Indiana counties that would allow one bobcat per trapper and a statewide harvest cap of 250.
It would be a much more restrictive harvest than is allowed in states such as Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas.
“You're allowed to harvest as you want to and to be quite frank with you, I've been in some of those states, and our population is higher than those states, so I think we've got a really strong number, especially here in the southern part of the state,” he said.
State legislators passed a bill last year requiring the DNR to establish bobcat trapping rules by July 2025. Proponents said bobcats can be a nuisance and kill livestock and other wild animals including turkeys.
“We don't want to take this animal into extinction,” Erny said. “We just want to be able to manage it better. And I think the DNR has started with a good way to do that.”
Though Erny hasn’t had those issues with bobcats, he does see them often on his property.
“I've been turning them loose for 10, 12, years now,” he said. “It was cool the first time. Then got old quick.”
The proposed rule, like virtually any regarding conservation and wildlife, has been controversial.
At the final public comment meeting in Franklin, everyone except one person was against the idea of trapping bobcats at all.
The one person in favor, Bartholomew County resident Thomas H. felt the rule didn’t go far enough.
“The only objection to the ruling is, I think it's too little,” he said. “40 counties, 250, I mean, that's an insignificant number. They're over populating. They're the number one predator in Indiana now. And they kill everything.”
Read more: Opponents of bobcat trapping proposal make their voices heard
Others at the meeting had many criticisms. Samantha Chapman, the Indiana Director of the Humane Society of the United States, asserted the rule is only being made to benefit trappers at the expense of actively harming a rare species.
“We recently did a public opinion survey that showed that over 75% of people in the state of Indiana, across all political demographics, oppose trophy hunting of bobcats,” she said. “My hope is that… the DNR will actually consider all of Hoosiers thoughts and opinions instead of just a small subset of the population.”
Most expressed concern that the DNR has not released enough evidence that the bobcat population could survive more than a few years of this level of trapping.
“It's a recovering population here in the state of Indiana, and so we just need more information before we know how many bobcats we could sustainably take here in Indiana, before we just start opening up a season for trapping,” she said.
Others, like computational biologist Zane Libke, said bobcats provide a key role in the food chain.
“They regulate the populations of small mammals such as the white-footed mouse, which is a primary vector of Lyme disease, so having abundant and healthy populations of these predators is going to help mitigate this public health risk,” he said.
Libke also said one of the underlying claims made by the legislature, that the bobcat population needs to be reined in because they hunt turkeys, simply isn’t true.
“In fact, the DNR themselves have published on their web page a statement saying that they have never in all of Indiana research documented a bobcat praying on a turkey,” he said. “So I don't know where Senator Baldwin got his information.”
On the webpage Libke is referring to, the DNR says that though research has not documented wild turkey consumption by bobcats, they would eat a turkey if they managed to catch one.
The DNR’s challenge is estimating the population of a wild animal, which is difficult and expensive.
Libke said some of the papers the DNR cites are behind a paywall, and that they should be made public so others can analyze it.
“What I ask of the DNR and the Natural Resource Commission (NRC) is to make this data and make this analysis available to the public so that scientists like myself can scrutinize this model and make sure that we're not going to cause irreversible damage to our bobcat populations,” he said.
Now that the public comment period is closed, the DNR and NRC will review what they received on the rule and decide whether to change it before it becomes official on July 1.
If the new rule is approved, the first bobcat trapping season would begin this fall.
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