The people against this have valid reasons. For example, ranchers who don't want their livestock eaten by wolves that they can't defend against, legally.
For comparison, roughly 25000 cattle are lost to cold every year in Montana.
[1] https://liv.mt.gov/Attached-Agency-Boards/Livestock-Loss-Boa...
When bear kills started to being paid by an ecologist group there was an awful lot of scam attempts also. I think that paying for predator damage are counterproductive at best, and at worst "fossilize" as a system to scam taxers and reinforce scammers.
Is not much different than expecting to be paid if you go for a beach day and you are stung by a jellyfish, or it rained that day. There are old proven solutions to reduce drastically this loses, is just that farmers choose not to use them.
I recall listening to NPR one day on this topic, and they pointed out that ranchers lose several orders of magnitude more livestock due to other preventable causes that are mostly in their control. It's not likely they care that much about their livestock.
Losses that are generally compensated by the government
You can use force against a wolf attacking a working dog or yourself, but not a pet.
In all other cases, you must use non-lethal detergent methods.
Otherwise you need a depredation permit that are "must issue" if you have evidence of a mountain lion attacking your livestock but only one in ten applicants are granted a lethal depredation permit. The rest must use non-lethal deterrents because lethal force is only authorized if there's a genuine threat to public safety.
For a rancher or someone living in a rural area, lethal permits are rarely issued. In several parts of the state like the Santa Monica and Santa Ana mountains permits are no longer issued at all.
(The term depredation comes from military attacks on helpless villages so the term is very fitting, both in terms of the mountain lion attacking livestock and humans hunting mountain lions)
Zero trolling: I don't understand this sentence. Are you saying that ranchers in other states have different options to deal with apex predators? If yes, can you please explain. I am curious to learn more.
The joke is based on a very Hollywood-informed idea of what this region is like (think Wild West movies and TV shows). It is not a reflection of reality.
However, it does seem that these guys have a dramatically outsized influence in political representation around these interests unfortunately.
The options are restricted mostly by law and local custom.
It seemed like an honest, innocent question, not snark at all. The response seemed dismissive and snarky, though.
This is a good reason to not try to get revenge for what you believe to be "snark": you might be totally wrong in your judgement. Best to just respond honestly and straightforwardly.
And government can promote the common good, saving all taxers millions, even if this means that one farmer will lose a thousand. This is how being in a society works. In a recent study, European Wolves attacked around 0,063% of the total sheep. A really small price to pay for reducing your chances to die in a deer car crash, or catching lyme disease.