Since the government began to discourage trapping and began systematically cutting back on predator control, we have lost nearly all of our deer, and we're losing our Mountain Sheep too.

Up here on the Virgin Mountain, where I used to see twelve or fourteen Mountain Sheep in a bunch, now you can hardly find a track. The last year I trapped, (the winter of 1988 and 89), the lions were so thick and so hungry they were eating nearly everything I caught. They even ate two of their own kind right out of my traps.

When I went to get my bobcats tagged in Kingman, (Arizona) in the spring of 1989,1 told Clark Fuller, one of the wardens there, about my experience with the lions and how they'd gotten nearly all the deer and were now working on the mountain sheep.

That's when he told me that they were aware of the problem, that they had made three sheep plants there on the Virgin Mountains, some by helicopter. He went on to say, they had put radio collars on fourteen of the sheep, and that since the plant, all fourteen had been killed by lions.

Ed.note: This was before the "drought".