The Rabbit War: Hares Get Some Allies

Animal rights groups on Tuesday condemned a proposed rabbit shoot at Leisure World in Seal Beach, where officials want to kill hundreds of wild hares scavenging through the retirement village’s golf greens and flower beds.

The fate of the thriving population of burrowing rabbits now is in the hands of the Seal Beach Police Department, which still must approve the eradication.

Department officials said a date for the rabbit hunt will not be approved until Leisure World’s exterminators submit a formal request for permission to “discharge a pellet gun” to eliminate the hares.

Leisure World’s proposed rabbit kill is emblematic of a much larger problem throughout Southern California, where wandering coyotes, raccoons, waterfowl and other wildlife have been greeted with both fear and wonderment, say environmentalists.

“It’s a problem that should be handled with compassion and intelligence. There are alternatives to killing,” said Bill Dyer of In Defense of Animals in Venice.

Dyer raised $20,000 last year to bankroll a successful effort to relocate 120 condemned goats from Santa Catalina Island, where caretakers had been using shotguns to rid the island of the feral animals.

“The public really does care about lives of animals,” Dyer said. “It’s proved it over and over again.”

The clash between suburban residents and wildlife will only become more frequent as development continues to spread from traditional urban cores, said Elizabeth Lambe, a Southern California regional representative for the Sierra Club.

“I think [eradication efforts say] something about our numbness to the animal kingdom that we are actually a part of,” Lambe said. “The thing that concerns me the most is: Are people going to be content to live in a world of shopping malls and parking lots?”

Last year, members of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals waged an unsuccessful campaign to keep a Rancho Santa Margarita community from shooting hundreds of coots, water birds residents said were fouling the planned community’s artificial lake.

On Tuesday, a PETA spokeswoman said the organization has asked Leisure World to halt any plans for a rabbit shoot.

“They’ve been killing these animals one way or another for years, and it’s obviously not solving the problem,” said Stephanie Boyles from PETA’s headquarters in Norfolk, Va.

Scourges of the Flower Beds

Officials at Leisure World bristled at the suggestion that they’re bent on slaughtering scores of rabbits that are causing no real harm.

Along with scads of rabbit droppings, the rabbits have ripped up residents’ flower gardens and the community’s nine-hole golf course, said Bill Narang, administrator for Seal Beach Leisure World. Replacing each green costs $40,000, he said.

Shooting the rabbits is a last resort, the administrator insisted. Exterminators have been trapping and using poisoned bait on the rabbits for years, but those methods of eradication cannot keep up with the current population boom. The rabbits haven’t been taking the poisoned bait because of the lush greenery available to them.

Some animal rights activists condemn all methods of eradicating animals, including poisoning, which can cause a painful death.

“It’s an outrage, it is irresponsible, and it doesn’t have to happen,” Dyer said. “There are alternatives to this.”

But Leisure World residents say the problem is reaching epidemic proportions.

“You can go out in the daytime, and they’re standing around in the streets. You go out at night, and there are 10 of them standing around,” said Paul Black, owner of California Agri-Control Inc. in Riverside, the exterminator hired by the 8,700-resident community.

“The feces are everywhere. It gets tracked into homes, . . . and it’s becoming a health problem,” he said.

Black said he only recently asked Leisure World officials for permission to use low-velocity pellet guns. The company needs a special permit to do so because Seal Beach prohibits not only the discharging of a firearm in the city limits but also air and pellet guns, Seal Beach Police Capt. Gary Maiten said.

Police Chief Mike Sellers will decide whether to allow the exterminators to shoot the rabbits only after both he and the city attorney study the request. The city has never had to handle anything like this, Maiten said. “This would be a first.”

Using pellets guns is effective and safe, Black said, and it’s a common method that many exterminators have used throughout Southern California to eliminate problem populations of rabbits, squirrels, pigeons and rats.

Although residents have been divided about a rabbit shoot, five of Leisure World’s 16 “mutuals”--residential subdivisions with individual governing boards--voted to go forward.

Beverly Carson, a resident in her 70s, said she can remember her 90-year-old mother shaking a paper at the rabbits as they decimated her flower beds. She says the animals should be “thinned out.”

“We probably put thousands of dollars into our flower beds, and by the morning [the flowers would] be gone,” Carson said. “They love pansies.”

Jackie Lewis, 73, said she understands the need to reduce the number of rabbits but thinks shooting them would be “just ridiculous.”

“Good Lord, they’re destructive. It was disheartening to see what they’d do to the gardens. And there’s so many of them now, and they’re so brazen,” Lewis said. “But shooting them, come on! If you live in Africa and there’s lions, you knew that, so why kill them? And these are just rabbits.”

Donald Reddington, 63, a retired forklift operator, said the rabbits added a layer of “normalcy” to a community where pets aren’t allowed.

“I don’t think I’ve seen two dogs in eight years,” Reddington said. “Coming here at night and shooting rabbits, that’s kind of weird.”

Leisure World officials said the community’s rabbit population exploded after the recent rains made the vegetation more lush, but it has been growing over the last decade after the number of foxes in nearby fields diminished.

“We used to have natural attrition of the rabbits because of the foxes,” Narang said. “But now we don’t have the animals to keep them in check.”

Once again, mankind is to blame, experts said.

Until recently, red foxes that prowled the nearby U.S. Naval Weapons Station and Anaheim Bay National Wildlife Refuge--a short scamper from Leisure World--kept the rabbit population at manageable numbers.

In the late 1980s, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed hundreds of the foxes to protect two endangered species of birds: the California least tern and the light-footed clapper rail.

Besides the birds, the foxes loved to feast on rabbits. With the foxes gone, the rabbits have multiplied--and continue multiplying, said biologist Charles Collins, an endangered species expert at nearby at Cal State Long Beach.

“There’s always liable to be problems whenever we start altering the environment. When you take a predator out of the system, its prey is going to grow unchecked,” Collins said. “Mother Nature is unforgiving.”

Veda Stram, outreach coordinator for Orange County People for Animals, said the infestation has been made worse because some at Leisure World feed the rabbits and the community plants vegetation the animals enjoy.

No Room for Wildlife

Some who oppose further development of Southland open spaces say it is ironic that people are drawn to the beauty of natural surroundings, yet complain about sharing their space with the animals that were there first.

“The more and more development moves into the last open space, the more bad things will happen to animals,” said Andrew Wetzler, a Los Angeles-based attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The cost already has been felt along the Eastern Toll Road in Orange County, where dozens of animals have been killed by the fast-moving traffic cutting through land that had been pristine open space. Even with the influx of $500,000 to strengthen fencing along the 1 1/2-year-old road, many deer, coyotes, bobcats and smaller species have become road kill.

Pat Scanlon, a professor of wildlife science at Virginia Tech, said there have been problems coexisting with wildlife nationally, dating back to colonial times when rice farmers in South Carolina would shoot at birds to scare them away.

Despite the long history, Scanlon said, there is still too little work done at the front end of community planning.

“People never wake up to these things until they are a serious problem,” Scanlon said. “People move into suburbs near woods and they think the deer are so cute. Then they spend several thousand dollars on landscaping, and suddenly the deer are eating their plants and they are the worst thing in the world.”

*

Staff writer Megan Garvey contributed to this report.