It is lawful to kill a cat if you're in danger.  Doesn't matter if you have a hunting license or not, you can and should protect yourself.  Not sure about protecting stock, but I would guess no one will get in trouble for doing so.

Off topic a bit, but would it be a good thing to get a healthy population of big cats here so we could have a hunting season?  From where I sit and type it is as I'd like an opportunity to hunt big cats, but I bet farmers and ranchers wouldn't think so.

Critter done: That sounds like a pretty darn wierd situation. What I can tell you is that mountain lions are not leopards and they do not cache or feed on their kills in trees for the most part. The reasons why leopards do so is so that they are able to escape the jaws of lions and hyenas that would otherwise take their bounty for themselves. Mountain lions do not have to deal with the same level of competition for resources and therefore use other methods of protecting their kills. They cache their prey by covering it up with litter right before dawn. They feed on the carcass at night, then cache it and retreat to a bedding area during the day and then return the following night. We had a cat come into the town of Fort Collins (big town on the Front Range of Colorado) and spend a week and a half in a city park. He bedded down only 10 yards from a running trail during the day and then would return to his cached kill during the night.

I agree with you though. That is a heck of a lot of work for someone wanting to play a joke on people. Very wierd.

CVC: I am not sure that building a large, huntable population of mountain lions is going to be obtainable in your state. Even though you might be able to get backing from a certain sub set of hunters that would be interested in the added opportunity of hunting the big cats. But you are going to run into a lot of resistance from a lot of different fronts. Wildlife introductions or reintroduction is always a hard thing to get done. There are going to be others in the hunting community that do not want cats present at all because of their affect that they would have on other hunted populations such as your white tailed deer herds. Hunters can be a vocal and strong political group but ranchers are a much larger stake holder group. And they have never been fond of large carnivore introductions. Just ask those cattle and sheep men up in Idaho. They were not even fond of lynx reintroduction in Colorado and were the main reason that the wolverine was taken off the slate when lynx reintroduction was still in its planning stages.

So yes, it would be cool to be able to hunt them out there but I wouldn't hold my breath.