A big-game hunting outfitter and his houndsman tricked their clients into participating in an illegal hunting method in Utah, federal officials said.
The duo pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud their high-paying clients by leading them on “ canned hunts for commercial gain ,” the U.S. District Attorney’s Office in Utah said July 22 in a news release.
A “canned hunt” is “when a cougar is treed, cornered, held at bay or its ability to escape is otherwise restricted to allow a person who was not a member of the initial hunting party to arrive and take the cougar,” charging documents say.
Canned hunts violate the concept of fair chase , an ethical framework for hunters that prevents them from gaining an unfair advantage over game animals, according to nonprofit hunting organization Boone and Crockett Club.
Utah law requires that when dogs are used to hunt cougars, the hunter who intends to kill the cougar needs to be present when the dogs are released and must participate in the hunt until it’s done, the documents say.
Wade Lemon, of Holden, Utah, has long owned and operated Wade Lemon Hunting — and tricked his clients into believing they were participating in live — not canned — mountain lion hunts, federal officials said.
He sold his guiding services for cougar hunts for $5,000 to $7,000 per hunt, and his houndsman, Kasey Yardley, would often corner the mountain lion long before the client arrived for the hunt, officials said.
Lemon’s company website boasts of an almost 100% success rate on trophy mountain lion hunts — which are notoriously risky, unpredictable and difficult. The website claimed more than 3,000 clients had “achieved their dream of harvesting a Trophy Mountain Lion.”
“What the website does not mention is that Wade Lemon has been cheating,” federal officials said. “His cougar hunts were canned.”
Those hunting mountain lions can typically expect to spend several long days tracking a cougar, officials said. During one canned hunt, Lemon’s client was “on the mountain for only 37 minutes before the hunt was over” — because while the client didn’t know it, Yardley’s dogs had already cornered the cougar before the client even got there, sentencing documents say.
State wildlife officials have long suspected Lemon of leading high-paying clients on trophy hunts using the illegal method and have been investigating him for years , The Salt Lake Tribune reported in 2022.
The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources has investigated him more than eight times for “allegedly breaking the law to ensure a successful hunt,” the outlet reported.
Infamously, Lemon faced multiple felony charges for allegedly baiting a black bear that Donald Trump Jr. shot in 2018 and making it seem like a legitimate hunt, the outlet reported along with the Utah Investigative Journalism Project.
On July 18, Lemon was sentenced to two months in prison, ordered to pay a $10,500 fine and banned from commercial activities on federal land for one year, officials said.
Yardley, 47, of Enoch, was sentenced to six months of bench probation after he pleaded guilty to his involvement in the scheme with Lemon, officials said. He is also banned from federal land for commercial purposes as part of his probationary terms.
McClatchy News reached out to attorneys for both Lemon and Yardley but did not receive an immediate response from either side.
“This is a unique and important case because hunting is an important part of Utah’s culture,” said U.S. Attorney Trina A. Higgins of the District of Utah in the news release. “Canned hunts are illegal because they create an unfair advantage and can lead to inhumane treatment of the animals. It is also unfair to hunters who paid thousands of dollars for a guide and had no idea that they were participating in a canned hunt. My office and our law enforcement partners take these crimes seriously because they negatively impact our state and the hunting community.”
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