Dr. Viorel Popescu
The Columbus Dispatch quoted Dr. Viorel Popescu, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences at Ohio University, in a story headlined “Decision on bobcat trapping due in May.”
Whether bobcat trapping becomes legal in Ohio will be decided next month. That’s more than enough time for activists to muster opposition and support.
The eight-member Ohio Wildlife Council is scheduled to vote May 9 on allowing the trapping of 60 bobcats, a species four years removed from threatened status, along with other proposals affecting the 2018-19 hunting/trapping year….
Bobcat sightings have increased in recent years, reaching nearly 500 in 2017. In addition, 82 bobcats were killed in 2017 on Ohio roads.
“That’s not a small number,” said Viorel Popescu, assistant professor of biological sciences at Ohio University and supervisor of the school’s Conservation Ecology Lab.
The wildlife division in October gave Popescu’s lab $245,000 to conduct a four-year study designed to determine the population of bobcats in areas where trapping would be permitted. That the division is requesting a bobcat trapping season before research is completed seems curious and runs against historical precedent.
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