US Wildlife Officials hunting down rare Florida Panther?

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency formed to protect wildlife, has taken an unprecedented step and marked for death a rare Florida panther known as FP 260. The wild panther is still alive, but has been targeted for capture and euthanasia, Craig Pittman reports for the Florida Phoenix.

Because of an Immokalee rancher’s persistent complaints that FP 260 was killing her calves, the federal agency decided the endangered panther should die, despite protests from biologists to relocate the panther.

FP 260 is the renegade panther with a taste for veal, unfortunately,” one state biologist wrote, per Pittman, who reviewed some 400 agency emails about the panther.

The endangered Florida panther has been in decline in the last half century or so, from hunting before it was illegal, then from development and cars.

There are around 200 Florida panthers left on the southern tip of the peninsula, a rebound from fewer than 30 in the 1990’s.

FP 260 first caught biologists’ attention after it was struck by a car in 2020 and crawled off the road and onto the Immokalee ranch of Liesa Priddy.

FP 260 was treated by veterinarians, fitted with a tracking collar, then turned loose a few weeks later in the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge.

But Priddy, a former state wildlife commissioner, has complained about panthers killing her cows for a decade. She said FP 260 killed 10 of her calves in a matter of months. Annual losses to panthers topped $25,000, she reported.

Wildlife officials tried everything, from hazing the animal to firing “shell crackers” to scare it off. They eventually relocated the panther 18 miles south, but it returned to the ranch.

In late December, federal panther coordinator David Shindle wrote that his agency had determined FP 260 should be “permanently” removed from the wild after Priddy said she feared the panther would attack a human.

Shindle wrote that the law “provides for removing animals that constitute a demonstrable but non-immediate threat to human safety, but now Calving season has ended at Priddy’s ranch and the panther has gone back to the wild

Axios / Crickey Conservation Society 2022.