Police Chief Blocks Bid to Shoot Rabbits at Leisure World

A controversial plan to shoot hundreds of wild rabbits at Leisure World was quashed Monday by the city’s chief of police.

Chief Michael Sellers said he had decided to deny a request by California Agri-Control, a Riverside pest control company, to shoot the rabbits with pellet guns late at night.

“Based on what I saw and what I read,” Sellers told the Seal Beach City Council in announcing his decision, “it was not safe at this time to discharge a weapon in a residential area. I did not see a safe way.”

Although a city ordinance prohibits the discharge of firearms or compressed-air guns within city limits, the chief can suspend enforcement in cases he deems appropriate. The extermination company requested special permission last week after some residents complained that the rabbits were overrunning their golf course, eating their flowers and leaving messes on sidewalks and lawns.

The possibility of a slaughter, however, drew a storm of protest from animal rights activists and animal lovers, many of them at Leisure World.

“There’s been hundreds of calls,” said Sgt. Tim Olson, a spokesman for the Seal Beach Police Department, “and they were overwhelmingly in favor of not touching the rabbits.”

Sellers said the extermination company still may trap and poison the rabbits, something it has been doing for about eight years. “The only thing the chief denied,” Olson said, “was the permit to shoot them with pellet guns.”