Animal Activists : Drawing a Bead on Hunting

At the age of 12, Sharon Negri stopped eating meat because “I knew I would never be able to shoot an animal so I shouldn’t eat one.” Ten years ago, she stopped drinking milk because she saw “how cows were treated on a farm.”

Now at 30, the self-described “animal lover”--animal rights activist “tends to mean something negative”--is at the forefront of a statewide campaign to ban mountain lion hunting. A potentially precedent-setting effort, the campaign has hunters, farmers and ranchers on the run.

“I think it’s going to send a shock wave through the wildlife community that we have to manage wildlife another way,” said Negri, confident that a lion hunting referendum being prepared for the 1990 ballot will succeed. “We just can’t senselessly shoot animals for fun.”

Thousands of Activists

Negri is one of thousands of activists who in the past few years have waged a steady and successful war against hunting in California. Banding together under such names as the Mountain Lion Preservation Foundation and the Committee for the Preservation of the Tule Elk, they come from the ranks of traditional environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and the more narrow pro-animal lobbies such as the Fund for Animals.

Through a string of recent court victories, the groups are forcing significant changes in the way the state regulates hunting, accelerating an already existing trend in the Department of Fish and Game away from the mere “harvesting” of animals toward one of protecting them. Their efforts have angered not only hunters, who see their sport threatened, but also ranchers and farmers who complain they are losing growing numbers of sheep and calves to hungry bears and mountain lions.

As an immediate consequence of the court decisions, state Department of Fish and Game officials must prepare extensive documentation on the health of a species before declaring a hunting season. But the anti-hunting efforts are expected to have longer term consequences as well, encouraging attempts to stop more hunts in California and elsewhere.

Preservationists’ Warning

Preservationists warn that such animals as elk, mountain lions and black bears will disappear if hunting persists and if development and people continue to press upon the state’s shrinking wilderness. But ranchers and farmers complain that if hunting is not allowed, the animals will get so hungry and crowded in the little space left to them that clashes with livestock, property and pets--numbering more than 300 statewide last year--will mount.

In 1987 and 1988, the Mountain Lion Preservation Foundation won court orders stopping scheduled lion hunts, and environmental activists, including members of the radical Earth First! group, harassed hunters during two bighorn sheep hunts.

The Committee for the Preservation of the Tule Elk obtained an order to stop last year’s elk hunt, and just last month two animal rights groups won a lawsuit that is expected to force the cancellation of this year’s black bear hunt. In the meantime, signatures are being gathered every day for the proposed 1990 mountain lion initiative, which calls for setting aside money for wildlife habitats as well as banning lion hunting permanently.

Not surprisingly, hunters are becoming increasingly jittery.

The animal activists “are a very serious threat because they are very, very vocal, and they are all very driven,” said Jack Perry, 55, a director of the California Wildlife Federation, a pro-hunting group.

The animal protection committees count thousands of members and contributors, not all of them active. Each group has its own agenda and acts independently, although most of the leaders know one another. Their memberships frequently overlap, not only with one another but with a variety of environmental groups.

The mountain lion foundation’s Negri, for example, previously worked as a lobbyist for the Planning and Conservation League, an environmental group, and is married to the founder of Friends of the River. J. William Yeates, a lobbyist for the mountain lion activists, is married to the former executive director of Friends of the Sea Otter.

“Members of the Mountain Lion Coalition (a sister group to the foundation) belong to Friends of the Sea Otter, and Friends of the Sea Otter belong to the tule elk committee,” said Edward Loosli, the tule elk committee vice president.

The groups all retained the same Sacramento lawyer, James Moose, to represent them in court, and two of the organizations use the same professional public relations firms.

Common Enemy

Their common enemy is the California Department of Fish and Game, which they accused in their lawsuits of threatening the very survival of animals by issuing hunting permits without adequately studying the size of the population and the effects of a hunt.

The challenges come at an already difficult time for the Fish and Game Department. The Little Hoover Commission, a state body that probes waste and mismanagement in state agencies, launched an investigation of the department’s management practices in March. Developers complain that the department has jeopardized construction projects with 11th-hour environmental concerns while at the same time environmental groups counter that the agency is not vigilant enough about protection.

Besieged from both sides, Fish and Game Department officials are being forced to defend their hunting policies. Department Director Peter Bontadelli, who attributes management problems to an infusion of new funds and responsibilities in recent years, said the agency can comply with the tougher requirements for holding hunts but will need to “reformat” and supplement its data on the animals.

Traditionally, the Fish and Game Department has existed primarily to serve the needs of hunters and fishermen, who financed the department’s operations through licenses and fees.

In recent years, however, special funds targeted for environmental protection have been added to the department’s budget, moving the emphasis away from wildlife consumption toward preservation. Earlier this year, the department established a “natural heritage” division for the protection of non-game animals and other wildlife and began charging the public fees to watch wildlife on department-owned lands.

Changes Applauded

Conservationists applaud the changes but complain that the governor-appointed Fish and Game Commission, which sets policy for the department, remains slow to protect wildlife. Under Gov. George Deukmejian, all of the five commissioners are hunters. Environmental groups criticize the commission for delaying protective status for threatened or endangered wildlife.

Emblematic of the panel’s perceived sympathy to hunters is a stuffed deer that hangs on the office wall of the commission’s executive secretary, Harold Cribbs. Cribbs compares the deer head display to a “seamstress putting a fine work of embroidery on the wall.” He contends, however, that the commission is no more pro-hunting than the department and at times is even more protective.

Even with the improvements, anti-hunting forces question whether Fish and Game Department officials can ever be trusted to protect the state’s dwindling wildlife. They cite the case of the California grizzly, an animal that is extinct, and claim the last grizzly was shot in 1922 by a Fish and Game Department officer. (Actually, the last grizzly was killed by a cattle rancher that year.)

Farmers, on the other hand, talk about the public safety risks of lions and bears being allowed to proliferate. Dick Hackett, who ranches on 4,500 acres about 30 miles south of Eureka, said the mountain lion is “annihilating” the deer population and, if unchecked, will eventually prey on children.

“The only thing that is going to turn (the anti-hunting movement) around is when there won’t be any deer left and the lion starts coming into the city and going after children,” Hackett said. “To a lion, a child looks like a little fat pig to eat.”

Attacks Called Rare

Fish and Game Department officials say lions will not wipe out a healthy herd of deer but acknowledge predation may slow recovery of an already troubled herd. And even though two children were mauled by lions in Orange County in 1986, attacks by lions remain rare, the officials said.

California is home to at least 5,100 mountain lions, 2,700 tule elk, 4,800 bighorn sheep and 15,000 black bears, according to state game figures. None of the animals are listed as threatened or endangered because their numbers have been steadily rising. Preservationists, however, challenge the method used by the department to calculate the populations, contending, for instance, that the department does not really know how many mountain lions roam the state.

Don Koch, coordinator of the Fish and Game Department’s bear and elk programs, confirmed ranchers’ claims that clashes betweens lions and bears and the public are rising. Koch cited a variety of reasons, including increasing numbers of the animals, difficulty in obtaining food because of the drought, and a rising number of people moving into their habitat.

“Lions (incidents) have gone up every year,” Koch said.

Last year, the department issued 189 permits to kill bears that had damaged property or attacked livestock or domestic pets and 148 permits for lions. In the end, 70 bears and 64 lions were shot under the permits. But the tule elk, which in past years raised howls from farmers after trampling down fences and feasting on alfalfa fields, has caused little damage recently, Koch said. Only one permit to kill an elk was issued last year.

The preservation groups say dogs can be a bigger threat to livestock than lions or bears. But to individual farmers, such comparisons matter little.

Shannon Wooten, who raises bees on the upper edge of Shasta Valley just below the Oregon border, complains that he lost $20,000 in hives last year to voracious bears.

‘Pretty Much Teaming Up’

“In lots and lots of cases last year, we had more than one bear in the area,” Shannon said. “The first bear comes in and takes the fence down, and then the second bear just walks in. They were pretty much teaming up.”

From their standpoint, hunters most fear the prospect of limits on deer hunting, the most popular hunting sport in California. Although few anti-hunting activists will rule out tackling deer hunting in the future, there seems to be little movement now toward taking on the state’s estimated 250,000 deer hunters.

Joyce Tischler, executive director of the Animal Legal Defense Fund, one of the plaintiffs in the suit that stopped the bear hunt, said she is becoming “increasingly interested” in whether deer in California should be protected but knows little about the state of the species.

“I would like to be assured that we have a healthy deer population, and I am beginning to suspect that we don’t,” she said. “But I would need to know whether indeed there is a problem, and if there isn’t, I’ve got plenty of other things I can pay attention to.”

Of all of the animal protection drives, the campaign to save the mountain lion seems to have gathered the most steam. The lion foundation boasts 28,000 active supporters, with an honorary board dominated by well-known environmentalists, philanthropists and Hollywood celebrities, including Robert Redford, Russell Train of the World Wildlife Fund, the Gordon P. Gettys and Doris Day.

The success of their campaign stems partly from the way a lion is hunted--dogs pursue it into a tree, and the hunter shoots it off a branch--and partly from the appeal of the elusive animal. Cat lovers may be especially vulnerable to their charms.

In a full-page newspaper advertisement last year, the Mountain Lion Preservation Foundation likened the lion to “a very large house cat” that is chased mercilessly by dogs for several hours, until, “terrified and exhausted,” it climbs a tree and is shot at point blank range.

“As for sport,” the ad says, “there is more challenge in setting a mousetrap.”