Malathion Opponents Smell a Rat : Medfly: A 5-square-mile area is spared from spraying to protect an endangered species. Activists wonder if the kangaroo rat is more important than humans.

Three months after state agricultural officials pledged not to grant any more exemptions from their aerial assault on the Mediterranean fruit fly, they have done it again--this time for the kangaroo rat.

At the request of U.S. wildlife agents who feared that malathion might harm the endangered species, state officials have agreed to spray around a five-square-mile area near Woodcrest in Riverside County where the rats roam wild on sparse, open grasslands. A fertile Medfly was recently found nearby in a citrus orchard, prompting creation of a new spray zone.

State officials say that federal law protecting endangered species left them no choice. But disclosure of the exemption still did not sit well with anti-malathion activists.

“It just shows the state’s priorities,” said Garden Grove anti-malathion activist Mollie Haines. “I’m just appalled to think that rats have more rights in the state’s eyes than I do or my children do.”

Added fellow activist Adelaide Nimitz of Burbank: “This says to me that kangaroo rats are more important than humans.”

Three months ago, state agriculture officials were hit with an outcry from spray-area residents when it was revealed that helicopters had omitted the Rev. Robert H. Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove from spraying because of an outdoor event for several thousand guests.

After that incident, state officials pledged--in public statements and at least one court hearing--that there would be no more exemptions from their aerial application of malathion over Southern California.

But Pat Minyard, deputy director of the Medfly Project in El Monte, said that when officials made that promise, they did not envision a situation like that of the kangaroo rat.

“This is a whole different thing,” he said. “There’s a radical difference between doing something to be nice guys,” as in the case of Crystal Cathedral, “and doing something because of the law. . . . We’d rather spray everything, but we have to comply with the law just like everybody else.” Brooks Harper, a supervisor with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Laguna Niguel, said the species known as the Stephens’ kangaroo rat--a furry, long-tailed, brown animal that is about the size of a chicken egg and roams the fields in western Riverside County--was threatened by the sprayings. The animals hop on their hind legs like kangaroos, hence their name.

“There’s a concern about the effects of malathion on the Stephens’ kangaroo rat. There’s not a lot of information on the subject, but it’s the fact that it may affect them that’s the trigger,” Harper said. “The fear is it would kill the animal.”

Wildlife experts worried that the kangaroo rat, as a nighttime animal, would have been directly exposed to the malathion and also might have ingested it through the small leafy plants and seeds on which it feeds. There are thought to be several hundred in the area that would have been affected by spraying, according to wildlife biologist Arthur Davenport.

Agriculture officials could have contested the wildlife service’s interpretation through a months-long bureaucratic process. Instead, they agreed to exempt from the 19-square-mile Woodcrest spray zone a portion of March Air Force base that is home to the kangaroo rats.

But before agreeing to the exemption, Minyard said he sent out four agriculture surveyors for two days in a search for fruit trees that the Medfly is known to attack. They didn’t find any, he said.

THE KANGAROO RAT

Stephens’ kangaroo rat, a tiny, long-tailed rodent that hops on its hind legs and roams the open fields of western Riverside County, has been listed as a federal endangered species since October, 1988. It was put on California’s threatened-species list in 1972.