Missouri hunter convicted of illegally killing mountain lion after it traveled nearly 800 miles
RON COUNTY, Mo. — Researchers had high hopes for the four-week-old mountain lion kitten they ear-tagged in 2023. They planned to revisit it a year later for a years-long mountain lion study in Nebraska.
A year and a half later, they’d learn the mountain lion was illegally shot and killed nearly 800 miles away in Missouri.
Joseph Licklider recently pleaded guilty to killing the state-law-protected animal in Iron County. Licklider previously told the Missouri Department of Conservation in November that he shot the mountain lion from a deer hunting tree stand while it was walking away from him. MDC determined the killing wasn’t justified for numerous reasons, including photos Licklider posted on Facebook showing him and others posing with the mountain lion after it was killed.
As part of the guilty plea agreement, Licklider was forced to pay $2,000, surrender his hunting rifle, and suspend his hunting license for a year.
Nebraska has been studying numerous mountain lion populations statewide for more than 15 years, according to Sam Wilson, manager of the Game and Parks Commission’s Furbearer and Carnivore Program. He said researchers had originally found the mountain lion as a kitten in March of 2023 near the Niobrara Valley Preserve because its mother had been fitted with an electronic GPS collar for the study.
“We never saw that kitten again,” Wilson told 5 On Your Side. “The next time I got information about that cat was that it had been killed in Missouri.”
It’s not the first time a mountain lion from Nebraska has been killed far from home. One of the animals traveled at least 650 miles to Minneapolis in 2023. Another walked more than 250 miles to Montana in 2022 before it was legally shot during the state’s hunting season. Although multiple states surrounding Nebraska have more mountain lions, the animals from Nebraska are easily identifiable by the study’s ear tagging process.
It’s common for mountain lions to walk hundreds of miles away from home, according to Wilson. Almost all young male mountain lions will travel long distances from where they were born to find female mates. The mountain lion on the prowl in Missouri was doing just that, but likely wouldn’t have run into a female mountain lion until it reached Florida.
“Mountain lions in any of our populations…sometimes make a choice to go east where females don’t disperse as far or as often, so they don’t encounter females when they head east and they just keep walking,” Wilson said. “They’ll never stop…the next mountain lion it would have run into would have been the Florida panther. I don’t know of any resident female populations between here and there.”
