Open Letter to Omaha Police Chief
Open Letter to Omaha Police Chief
Chambers is Right
Update: there is a petition on this topic:
https://www.change.org/p/rescue-the-omaha-mountain-lion
Dear Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer,
I hope all is well with you and I greatly appreciate your service to Omaha.
However, Omaha needs to carve out a new policy regarding mountain lions. Your officers are ill-equipped to take down a mountain lion and would have to unload over a dozen shots to kill a mountain lion. This takes an unexpected emotional toll on officers who have to carry out such orders.
Former Fremont State Sen. Charlie Janssen convinced Senator Ernie Chambers to support vanity license plates. This is why the Nebraska Examiner can boldly show Chambers embracing a mountain lion license plate (https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2023/08/06/nebraskas-no-1-champion-of-mountain-lions-ernie-chambers-weighs-in-on-omaha-sightings/). And, for all the fanfare, Chambers is right to point the public into a different direction in regards to handling mountain lions.
With these items in mind, I make the following request. The Omaha Police Department should have, at the very least, a rifle meant to take down large game animals such as mountain lions by a single shot, instead of forcing officers to unload dozens of shots from a Glock pistol. Omaha and Douglas County officers follow my newsletter and I know they do not want to be in a position to kill an animal with multiple shots when such an animal has caused no harm to anyone. Using multiple shots to kill a cute majestic animal is very painful to officers' mentality.
Ideally, the Omaha Police Department should look to western states who use snare traps to capture and tranquilize such large game animals. The Nebraska Games and Parks Commission should look to such policies but does not and Omaha City Government follows such inept policies. Such evasive policies ignore the problems of an officer being traumatized from killing an innocent animal.
Chief, I realize this public proclamation will probably go nowhere and you are likely to ignore it. I honestly cannot fault you for that. However, you could really bolster a lot of support from the rank and file of police officers by calling for reform in the policies regarding mountain lions. Think about it. How do you recruit police officers if they know they may be in a position to take multiple shots at an animal which has harmed no one? The current policy is inhumane and discourages people from joining law enforcement.
Speaking as someone who lived in Colorado Springs for twelve years, a mountain lion in town is only there for one of two reasons: either it's young and just learning to hunt, or it has gotten too old and diseased to be fast enough to catch game out in the country.
Old lions are wary of people, but they'll eat pets. Young lions--like the one caught on the Ring cam--are still figuring out how to kill enough small game to keep themselves fed, and cities look tempting until they have a few close calls and realize that they really prefer the taste of deer anyway. But they can be scared off by bear dogs and livestock guardian dogs, and even by geese.
We lived side-by-side with mountain lions (and we knew they were in the general neighborhood) the entire time we lived in the Springs. (we had this huge neighborhood fox that we saw, and we even had a bear visit us too--so we had more to wonder about/worry about than just the lions)
It's a very different way to live. Parents would look out their windows and CHECK their backyards to make sure there weren't any large cats sunning themselves before letting kids go out to play. Especially if they were younger kids. Pet owners took extra precautions too. And hunters were empowered (after a call to Colorado's Game and Wildlife officers) to put a bullet through the skull of any lion they saw stalking kids playing on ball fields or in back yards.
Policemen may be trained to shoot, but--policemen have other duties and higher priorities, and can't always come running in time to catch a lion. And even when they aren't exactly in a hurry, lions can still move pretty quickly.
Like I said, it's a different way to live. But short of putting out bounties on all the lions now in the state, I just don't see that we have any choice but to retrain the residents of Lincoln and Omaha. Lions have territories that extend for 40+ square miles, and frequently overlap. They go where the deer go. If you have deer coming into your yard, you have lions following them.
And they're smarter and sneakier than you, and the only way you're going to see them (most of the time) is on critter cams and Ring.
Thank you