Condor Proposal Took a Cheap Shot at Hunters

Your July 31 editorial, “Getting the Lead Out,” advocating banning lead bullets to protect the California condor is just another backdoor attempt at gun control. Funny, but the biggest threat to the condor is overpopulation, which your newspaper has encouraged for years via illegal immigration. The condor is fated to extinction or existence in captivity. It cannot survive in the wild with millions of humans nearby.

Where will “gun control” stop? When swords, aboriginal bows and arrows and Stone Age spears are banned, as the Australians now are doing? This sort of thing is not why my ancestors came to America.

Christopher Keller

Alhambra

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The Times should be ashamed of itself. What a hatchet piece against hunters. If lead is the big problem with the condor recovery, then why has the population of turkey vultures done so well in California? They share the same habitat and the same food source and they are physically smaller. Any expert would surmise that being smaller would put them at greater risk.

I think it would be a good idea to do a little more research before you disrupt the millions of gun hunters in this state by outlawing lead bullets. Oh, but the research might show that the $35 million spent on the condor recovery was a waste of money because the Pleistocene habitat that these condors thrived in 11,000 years ago is gone forever. I point you to Arthur Cleveland Bent, noted ornithologist with the Smithsonian Institution, who wrote that the California condor never enjoyed a wide distribution, being confined mainly to the hot interior valleys and mountains of California west of the Sierra Nevada. He wrote that in 1939.

Trevor Santochi

Laguna Niguel