Hunting: a Perverse Plan

The decision of the Department of Fish and Game to turn management of much of the San Jacinto Wildlife Area over to a private hunting club, and to allow put-and-take hunting, is a perversion of the purpose of California’s wildlife areas. Instead of saving tax dollars as advertised, the program threatens the wildlife that the area is designed to protect.

Like California’s other 55 designated wildlife areas, the department established San Jacinto to preserve the area’s natural habitat and to allow for bird-watching, hiking, camping and even hunting of native species. The department’s plan, which at first glance looks benign, would permit a hunting club to run a public bird-hunting program on about one-third of San Jacinto’s starkly beautiful 4,000 acres in Riverside County. In return, the club would build the necessary facilities and put itself at the disposal of state authorities to help maintain the area.

The scheme, however, smacks of political favoritism. Its catalyst is Fish and Game commissioner Al Taucher, whose hunting club lost its lease on its San Bernardino County hunting grounds and is looking for new territory. More important, the plan would severely burden San Jacinto’s wildlife and should be scrapped on that basis.

The department’s proposal calls for a put-and-take hunting scheme, by which pen-raised birds are released to be shot. Apart from being a rather unsportsmanlike way of killing fowl, this type of program was never envisioned by those who established state wildlife areas. Such a program would permit more hunting than the area could support. Under the put-and-take scheme, up to 100 hunters a day, seven days a week, 7 months out of the year, would be allowed to hunt in San Jacinto. Hunters would be free to blast not only the pen-raised birds but the area’s few native game birds as well. Under such conditions, the native fowl would not likely last long. The put-and-take season, moreover, would be longer than the regular hunting season. Whether hunters could distinguish between pen-raised and out-of-season fowl is doubtful at best.

Hordes of hunters would likely endanger the Stephen’s kangaroo rat, a threatened species protected by state law. Indeed, the hunting area surrounds the belt where most of the rats live. (They’re more like prairie dogs or squirrels than ordinary rats.) The plan would forbid hunting in the rats’ habitat, but not retrieval of game there. Extensive hunting could also threaten the golden eagle, another protected species that inhabits the San Jacinto area.

The San Jacinto Wildlife Area was established to let the public enjoy its great natural beauty, not to provide an arena for the hunting of externally raised fowl. Private management may have its place in wildlife areas, but put-and-take hunting does not.