RAPID CITY - As the mountain-lion hunting season in the Black Hills gets into full swing, Game Fish & Parks officials say that the season is a healthy solution to decreasing the lion population in the Hills; but one lion advocate maintains that it is nothing more than a sport for hunters.

In its third year, mountain-lion hunting is still a hotly debated topic.

"I think the department approach to this has been based on sound biological data and decisions being made," GF&P regional supervisor Mike Kintigh said. "We're going in slowly, gradually increasing the harvest and the pressure until we find the point where we start to go to that downward trend."

Kintigh said the GF&P might take a step back on the limit after this year's hunting season, depending on how it goes.

Sharon Seneczko, a Custer veterinarian and lion advocate, says the season is purely for entertainment and accomplishes nothing else.

"I think that the season is only going to satisfy a hunting thirst, and that is about it," she said.

This year, hunters will be able to shoot almost twice as many female lions as they could last year. During its 2007 meetings, the GF&P Commission decided to raise the limit to 15 female lions or 35 total lions.

The season, which started Thursday, will end Dec. 31, or sooner if either 15 female lions or a total of any 35 lions are killed. Last year, the limit was eight females or 25 total lions.

By Friday afternoon, hunters had already killed four female lions - meaning 11 more females can be shot before the season will end.

The other change to the hunt redefines the hunting units. In past years, there was a hunting unit in the Black Hills and another unit outside the Black Hills for landowners only. This year, the two units have been combined into one unit.

Kintigh doesn't expect the increased harvest limits to lead to a much longer lion season. Last year, hunters filled the limit in 19 days by killing eight females, and the year before, it took 24 days.

"I don't think it's going to change a lot for the hunters that are partaking in the season," Kintigh said. "The increase in the harvest limit might give them a few extra days to hunt, though I still anticipate the season only lasts about a month."

Seneczko believes that the increased limits are only going to decrease the average age of the lions and that hunters will likely maim several animals during the season. Both of those factors will increase - not decrease - the amount of human/lion encounters, she said.

"Is our amount of problems and depredation going down? No," she said. "I'm suggesting that what they're doing will actually make it worse. It will make depredation more common."

Seneczko cited the example of a woman whose dog was killed by a mountain lion at a residence 3 miles west of Custer a few weeks ago. That lion was missing part of its foot.

GF&P wildlife division manager Tony Leif said there is still no conclusive evidence that the season is decreasing human/lion encounters.

"We're pretty new into having the hunting season, so I don't know that we can make any valid interpretation of what effect the season is having on those factors right now," he said.

However, he said that during the first two years of the season there were at least two cases where landowners with licenses were able to get rid of potential problem lions lurking around their property.

And the first lion killed in this year's hunting season was shot near Galena in an area where the GF&P had gotten reports of lion sightings. GF&P regional wildlife manager John Kanta said that lion was a potential problem lion.

He said he was not surprised at how quickly the four female lions were taken this year.

"It doesn't surprise me," he said. "We anticipated we'd have (a) good harvest. The indication is we're saturated with mountain lions."

Leif agrees. He said the season is purely for management. "We want to manage for a sustained mountain-lion population in the Black Hills, and this hunting season we're going to have on the first of November is fully within that management objective," Leif said before the start of the season.

Seneczko believes the GF&P should have kept the limits where they were and should use other methods to reduce encounters.

"What's going to help that is removing problem lions and educating the public as to how to live in lion country," she said.

Contact Ryan Woodard at 394-8412 or ryan.woodard@rapidcityjournal.com