Our Opinion: Investigate Fish and Game

The state’s Natural Resources Agency and other officials need to investigate the California Department of Fish and Game’s operations on the Central Coast.

Doesn’t it seem as if the first option for some of these “wildlife officials” is to kill large mammals? Sometimes there also can appear to be indifference or negligence, such as with the case involving two mountain lion cubs recently found on Aarhus Drive in Solvang. Witnesses said the cubs appeared to be starving on the two different days they saw them. The mother was nowhere in sight on either occasion.

A community-supported nonprofit group had to step in to provide medical care.

None of this is new.

Think back to 2005 when we wrote on these pages: How naive and gullible do officials from the California Department of Fish and Game think residents of this state are? Are Californians supposed to believe one lame excuse after the next when government employees unnecessarily shoot and kill wild animals, from mountain lions to black bears?

That year officials killed an escaped tiger in Ventura County in the chaparral-covered hills near the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley. Fish and Game had tracked the declawed animal over days and had time to come up with a plan to sedate or capture the tiger.

Just weeks later, a federal tracker shot dead a mountain lion in the Santa Ynez Valley with the department’s blessing. The cougar’s supposed “crime”? Hunting two alpacas. Instead of educating the rancher to avoid problems in the future, though, state Fish and Game signed off on the shooting.

And who could forget that officials also shot a black bear with tranquilizer darts in Los Olivos? But rather than save its life, they proceeded to take the bear into the forest and kill the animal with a bullet to its head. Next, they tossed its body into a trash dump.

The News-Press reported: “After the animal was shot with tranquilizer darts, it was taken to the forest where it was killed, which Lt. Roland Takayama of Fish and Game said was in keeping with state policy. After it was killed by a single shot to the head, its body was dumped at the Tajiguas Landfill.”

Fish and Game officials rebuffed efforts by experts in animal rescue –

the same ones who acted to help the Solvang cougar cubs – to save the bear.

Lt. Takayama also was involved in the case of the cougar cubs.

Until there’s an investigation, it will be hard to believe that much coming out of the local Fish and Game office involving mountain lions and bears is credible information.

Take it all with a lot of skepticism.