Over the last several years, we’ve done a lot of reporting on how Washington state manages its wildlife. The reason for this is that Washington has been a clear example of how anti-hunting philosophy can creep into a state’s wildlife management strategy and lead to absurd hunting restrictions.
The State’s department of fish and wildlife functions through its wildlife commission, which consists of nine citizen members appointed by the governor. As Andrew McKean reported earlier this year, there has been “simmering hostility over the past few years in Washington, as the commission has become dominated by ecologists who have de-emphasized the role of hunting in ungulate management and elevated principles of landscape health. Highly charged commission meetings have degenerated into either shouting matches or chilly impasses with agency personnel sometimes paralyzed in the middle.”
In 2022 the state canceled its spring black bear hunt through a 5-4 commission vote, even though there were no scientific-based management reasons for canceling the hunt.
Since then the Sportsmen’s Alliance, a national hunting advocacy group, has been digging into the records of those commissioners. In 2023, the Sportsman’s Alliance made a massive records request, essentially asking for the communications between those appointed commissioners who they suspected of colluding with anti-hunting groups. After years of waiting and a subsequent lawsuit, this spring the Sportsman’s Alliance has uncovered these documents which they say demonstrate a pattern of public exclusion, bad governance, and collusion.
For example, one of the emails they uncovered shows how the commissioners attempted to create an alternative narrative after a 9-year-old girl was attacked and brutally mauled by a mountain lion in 2022. The girl, Lily Kryzhanivskyy, was playing hide and seek at a kids camp when she was attacked. An email from commissioner Lorna Smith to the other commissioners suggests she did not like how the media was covering the attack and it demonstrates how she wanted to override local wildlife specialists’ perspectives. She wrote: “The cat was an 8 month old kitten, (True?) that should have still been with its mother, not a ‘young adult.’ The girl was playing hide and seek, jumped up, shouted ‘boo!,’ surprising the cat which immediately attacked her, which could certainly be interpreted as an defensive action.”
“Unfortunately Jeff Flood is being heavily quoted about the cat’s intention to kill the girl, and in my opinion, he should not be the spokesman.”
Flood was a Stevens County wildlife conflict specialist and an experienced houndsman who told The Center Square at the time: “It was a bad deal … That cougar wasn’t playing around with her, he was trying to kill her.”
In May, the Sportsmen’s Alliance, filed a petition with Washington Governor Bob Ferguson requesting the removal of commissioners Barbara Baker, Lorna Smith, Melanie Rowland, and John Lehmkuhl.
To hear about what they found in the thousands of emails and texts, listen to my interview with Todd Adkins, senior vice president of the Sportsmen’s Alliance, on the latest episode of the Outdoor Life Podcast. You can listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And, check out some of the Sportsmen’s Alliance’s videos below.
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