LAKE CREEK — Greg Blascka stops his pickup on a snowy forest road, drops the tailgate, opens the doors on his aluminum dog box and urges his two best Walker tracking hounds into action.

"Find a kitty," Blascka says. "Go find him."

The kitty on Blascka’s mind and on his dogs’ noses this evening is a bobcat, which Blascka prizes for its hide. Other days he and his hounds are chasing foxes and raccoons. Occasionally, the dogs get sidetracked and chase a cougar, but those cats get a free pass.

"I won’t kill a cougar without my dogs and I can’t do that in this state," says Blascka, 48, of Eagle Point.

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A decade after Oregon voters told Blascka and other houndsmen to stop chasing cougars and bears with their dogs, the debate still rages whether Measure 18, which went into effect Dec. 8, 1994, has caused more harm than good for Oregon’s wildlife and people.

The measure’s chief backers contend that the ban did exactly what it was intended to do. It stopped the chasing and treeing of bears and cougars for sport and the use of bait piles to attract bears within shooting range.

"I don’t think any piece of legislation is perfect," says Wayne Pacelle, chief executive officer of the Humane Society of the United States, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that helped draft and push for the measure.

"But we firmly believe that hunting with hounds and bait is inhumane and unsporting and should end where possible," he says. "We did that for bears and cougars in Oregon. I’m not sure why people would knock this."

Moreover, Pacelle says, Measure 18 has shown Oregon’s wildlife managers that the hunting community no longer alone decides how animals are hunted and managed in Oregon.

"It was important to send a signal that wildlife policy decisions shouldn’t be made solely by the user groups," Pacelle says. "This was an important way to open up the process to non-hunters."

But wildlife managers, many hunters, residents in areas populated with livestock-killing cougars and even some animal-rights activists continue to find fault with the measure — all for different reasons.

Brooks Fahy of the Eugene-based group Predator Defense considers the measure a resounding failure because houndsmen like Blascka remain in the woods chasing other species that he believes deserve the same protection as cougars and bears.

The number of cougars killed for sport and for damage complaints has doubled since the measure passed. And the initiative helped galvanize Oregon’s disorganized hunting community, Fahy maintains.

"I don’t take glee in this, but somebody has to say it," Fahy says. "In my opinion, (HSUS) is a Wal-Mart type of animal-welfare organization coming in and making everything worse.

"Sometimes, nothing is better than something, and Measure 18 is a classic example," he says.

A decade ago, Pacelle declared Dec. 8, 1994, as "the dawn of a new day for bears and cougars in Oregon" thanks to Measure 18, which passed a month earlier with 52 percent of the vote. It failed in Jackson and Josephine counties but carried in metropolitan areas.

In the year prior to the measure’s passage, half of the roughly 1,400 bears killed by hunters were taken with the aid of pursuit hounds or bait piles, and more than 90 percent of the 144 cougars killed by hunters were chased by hounds.

After a short dip in bear harvest in 1995, the number of bears shot annually by hunters in Oregon has remained stable around the pre-Measure 18 levels of about 1,000 animals annually.

Cougar harvest dropped dramatically at first, but the sport-harvest of cougars now is higher than pre-Measure 18 levels — largely because Oregon lengthened the season and dropped the price of its cougar tags so more than 34,000 people now are carrying tags.

Over the past decade, the estimated cougar population has grown from about 3,200 animals to between 5,000 and 6,000, with hunter harvest and damage problems soaring right along with it.

"The department’s ability to control that population growth at a more manageable level became more difficult with the passage of Measure 18," says Ron Anglin, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s wildlife division administrator. "We can’t go in and target cats because we don’t have that effective tool — hunters with hounds."

The result is that cougar populations have grown at a higher rate since the hounding ban than before, Anglin says.

"The goal was to control the population, and we’ve been unable to do it," Anglin says. "We can’t kill enough cats."

Hunters and biologists maintain that the increase in predators has contributed to the decline of deer and elk herds across Oregon.

An ODFW study has shown cougars account for more than half of the elk calf deaths annually in a northeast Oregon study area. That alarms John Thiebes, a retired ODFW wildlife biologist who is field coordinator for the Oregon Hunters Association.

"I think it’s a travesty that Oregon voted out a great opportunity the ODFW had to manage cougar populations by using the public and public hunting seasons," Thiebes says.

As a wildlife biologist in Central Point until last year, Thiebes says he spent many hours each week dealing with damage complaints or people who feared for their safety because of a cougar in their neighborhoods.

Current damage laws allow using dogs to kill problem cougars, but rarely can dogs chase cougars near towns without trespassing onto neighboring properties, Thiebes says.

"Most of that time was spent holding people’s hands because they were afraid," Thiebes says. "But a lot of it was legitimate instances of people losing livestock and pets to cougars.

"People who voted for (Measure 18), I believe, were duped as to what it would cost the ODFW," Thiebes says.

Sally Mackler, wildlife chairwoman for the Oregon Chapter of the Sierra Club, scoffs at Thiebes’ assertions.

Mackler says the measures in place can protect livestock, pets and people from cougars. She also believes owners need to keep their pets and livestock indoors at night.

And there remains no confirmed attack on a human by a cougar as some opponents predicted, she says.

"Ten years has shown us we certainly can co-exist with cougars and hunt cougars without hounds," Mackler says. "We don’t need to use cruel hunting methods.

"The dire predictions of the poor losers of the Measure 18 battle have not come to fruition," Mackler says.

Anglin says cougar populations would have grown in Oregon if Measure 18 failed, and damage problems would have risen as more people and more cougars inhabit the same locales.

"We would have had problems, but I don’t think they would be as bad as they are now," Anglin says.

Fahy, the Predator Defense executive director, believes Measure 18 would have done better if it banned houndsmen like Blascka from pursuing any animals with dogs. Fahy believes the climate in 1994 could have resulted in a complete ban of pursuit dogs, and faults the Humane Society of the United States for aiming too low with Measure 18.

"You can spin this that we made something better," Fahy says. "But with all the money these organizations (like HSUS) have, this is the best they could do?"

Pacelle of HSUS concedes that the measure should have included other species in the hound-hunting ban, particularly bobcats and coyotes.

"At that time, we believed most of the hound hunters were focused on bears and cougars," Pacelle says. "We didn’t think bobcats or coyotes were a potentially big piece of it. If they didn’t have bobcats and coyotes, maybe (houndsmen) would have packed it in."

In 1994, Pacelle says, Measure 18 backers had to craft the initiative in a way they thought would win at the polls.

"Any action in the political domain is shaped by what’s possible," Pacelle says.

But he dismisses any faulting of the measure for not reaching far enough.

"If we were to do it again, these realities would have caused us to rethink some of it," Pacelle says. "But we don’t think that makes it not valuable."

Since Measure 18 passed, Blascka has gone to Northern California to pursue bears with his hounds, and he hauls his dogs to Nevada for cougar hunting.

But it’s strictly bobcats, foxes and raccoons in Oregon.

"My sport," he says, "is a dying sport."

Reach reporter Mark Freeman at 776-4470, or e-mail mfreeman@mailtribune.com