I have a little experience in one cougar collaring program which operates outside of Cle Elum. The department I used to work for at CWU funded the program at Cle Elum high school. I can't remember how many cougars they had collared, but it wasn't that many.

Anyway, the impression I got was that the biologists did not care if you shot a collared animal. There was a lot of information they could collect from a hunter's kill, I think more or less they just wanted their collar back plus info on the cat.