Cutting Trees and Feeding Koalas

* Re “Residents Fight Loss of Eucalyptus Tree Buffer,” Feb.7.

In an age when destruction of the rain forest in Brazil and clear-cut logging in our country are universally condemned, we discover that the Los Angeles Zoo is cutting down a lush urban forest in Encino to feed five koalas.

Anthropologists tell us that the aborigines arrived in Australia 30,000 years ago. Are we to assume that since their arrival koalas have hired them to cut eucalyptus trees down to stumps so they can better enjoy the shoots the zoo would have us believe they prefer?

Michael Dee, the mammal curator at the zoo, states that the zoo has enough food on hand to last the koalas another 8 months. What exactly does he mean by this? Are there enough trees in the zoo to feed the koalas for 8 months? If so, where is the pressing need to cut trees in Encino? Has the zoo heard of crop rotation?

Are we to assume that the trees in the zoo and in Griffith Park where this supply is coming from have been cut down to 3-foot stumps? Or are they harvesting from full-grown trees? I don’t really believe the zoo would cut down their own trees or park trees down to stumps, so these trees could be harvested by bucket trucks or other methods that could also be used in Encino.

At a time when the priority of the city should be planting trees there is no excuse for what the zoo is doing. The turning of 80-foot trees into 3-foot stumps must stop. Surely the zoo can harvest the leaves from these trees without destroying their value as a tree in the process.

JOHN DEMING

Encino