California officials sign off on plan to slaughter all mule deer on Catalina Island
It's not the first time wildlife extermination has been carried out on the Channel Islands by self-styled environmental "good guys."
Yet another wildlife extermination event is set to take place on California’s Channel Islands.
Readers of UNWON will be familiar with these islands off the Southern California coast and their dark history replete with allegations of destroyed ranches, slaughtered wildlife, and general predation by the National Park Service (NPS) and environmental nonprofits.
On January 26, officials from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) carried on that bleak tradition by approving a plan from the Catalina Island Conservancy to exterminate the island’s so-called “invasive” mule deer.
The operation is to be carried out by ground teams equipped with rifles, after an original plan to mow down defenseless deer from helicopters was scrapped due to public discomfort.
“Since October 2023, residents shared concerns about aerial shooting of deer,” the organization said in its carefully sanitized public statement. “That method was removed from the plan, and the Conservancy shifted to ground-based specialists using rifles in controlled operations under strict safety protocols.”
According to the extermination plan, dubbed “Operation Protect Catalina Island,” the deer will be killed and their meat used to feed California condors, an endangered bird species.
Science “stretched” to keep hunting off Catalina Island?
Charles Whitwam is the founder of HOWL for Wildlife, an organization focused on protecting species through science-based management. He argues that a reasonable hunting program would keep mule deer populations in check, Whitwam says the Catalina Island Conservancy doesn’t even know how many mule deer there are. Official counts are vague—somewhere between 500 and 1800.
“Those population estimates are based on spotlight surveys where officials count 300 or so deer and extrapolate that number to the size of the island,” he says. “We proved this is not accurate with our initial drone surveys. The deer densities are not consistent across the island.”
His group has offered to fund an accurate deer count and management plan. He suspects there are far fewer deer on the island than the Conservancy is claiming.
“If that’s true,” he says, “Then all the claims about impact are immediately put into question.”
Whitwam directed an investigative documentary on the issue titled Killing Catalina. He believes the science is being intentionally stretched in order to remove all possibility of hunting from the island.
“The waste, the messy science, the ‘science is settled’ dialogue, something just doesn’t smell right.”
History of state-sanctioned wildlife slaughter on Channel Islands
The Channel Islands have been targeted for decades by environmental and government groups. Five of the eight islands now form a National Park, after generational ranching was systematically removed in a series of events documented by UNWON. Hunting programs on the islands have also been shuttered. Channel Islands National Park seems to be ground zero for the most extreme expressions of the anti-human mindset rampant within NPS.
In 2006, The Nature Conservancy had wild pigs killed from helicopters on Santa Cruz Island
On Santa Cruz Island in 2006, The Nature Conservancy exterminated the last of the island’s wild pig population after obtaining the land when the last rancher on the island passed away in 1987. The nonprofit quickly eliminated his cattle operation and eventually went about exterminating the island’s wild pigs in a helicopter operation.
Roosevelt elk and mule deer exterminated from Santa Rosa Island by National Park Service
On Santa Rosa Island, once-abundant herds of Roosevelt elk and mule deer were killed off on the orders of park officials by 2011. NPS determined these species were “non-native” and therefore damaging the ecosystem of the island. They were eventually eliminated by armed helicopter squads.
The ranching families of the Vail & Vickers cattle ranch on Santa Rosa Island brought elk and deer to the island in the early 1900s and eventually created a hunt club. NPS couldn’t have that.
“Hunting is not authorized in national parks,” said park spokesperson Yvonne Menard in a 2011 interview with the Santa Barbara Independent. “National parks are set aside to preserve the natural environment. The impacts of nonnative deer and elk are known to have impacts on visitors as well as on natural and cultural resources.”
In a three-part explosive tell-all published by the Independent in 2006, former Channel Islands Superintendent Tim Setnicka broke with the NPS by disclosing the unethical methods the agency had used to get ranchers and hunters off the Channel Islands. He alleged that monitoring by biologists beginning in 1998 showed the existing number of deer and elk had “minimal and acceptable impacts” on native plant species.
“There is no clear and convincing biological information that supports the concept that the park service cannot successfully manage Santa Rosa Island with 1,100 deer and elk running around on it forever,” Setnicka wrote.
The data didn’t matter. Setnicka described in detail how NPS worked to get the Vail ranching family out so the government could “gain ownership to Santa Rosa Island for all time.” Once the cattle and the ranchers were gone, the deer and elk had to go, too. Never mind that, as Setnicka put it, NPS could find “no examples of ranch operations driving any species to extinction.”
Santa Rosa Island rancher says deer and elk are important to island health
In correspondence reacting to Setnicka’s exposé, rancher Al Vail explained why his family had imported deer and elk to Santa Rosa Island.
“The Vails’ importation of deer and elk to Santa Rosa island approximately 80 years ago was motivated not by commercial gain, but along the ethic of improving the diversity of life on the ranch lands, a common practice by ranchers in that early era. Animals were hunted only for meat and hides for leather to support the ranch itself. Commercial hunting was only begun in 1979 as a result of our realizing our obligation to better manage the herds for their health.
Make no mistake about it, the enforced eradication of deer and elk on Santa Rosa Island is the unwelcome consequence of litigation fed by Park Service personnel. It is the result of a settlement that was forced on Vail & Vickers because they could not afford to continue to fight forces cooperating with the NPS with unlimited funds. There is no biological need to do so. There is only the emotional argument that these animals, habituated as they are to Santa Rosa Island over the past 80-plus years, must go to satisfy the political whims those who see them as non-native.
This is quite arbitrary as these animals are native in equivalent habitat across the western United States. Further, these herds represent a great resource as an isolated source of genetics of two of the great large animals of North America. Quarantined as they are, they could provide breeding stock to repopulate mainland herds decimated by habitat loss or disease. Finally, the herds represent a great recreational resource to the public, both hunter and non-hunter alike. In our personal experience, we never come upon an island visitor who doesn’t remark with great interest on the beauty of these two grand wildlife species.”
Vail also pointed out that “well-managed controlled hunting is precisely what keeps habitat and animal herds healthy around the world, as on Santa Rosa Island.”
He found irony in hunting being outlawed on national park land as the rationale for methodically mowing wildlife down via aerial gunfire.
“Game management is almost always supported by hunting which provides the funds to do so,” Vail wrote. “This is a very different thing from the enforced indiscriminate eradication of whole herds of animals by decree.”
Fate of the Catalina Island mule deer sealed
None of this history can stop the fate of Catalina’s mule deer. From government agencies to green groups, an attitude of derision and dismissal if not outright opposition toward traditional land stewards seems endemic to the new lords of the Channel Islands. From cattle ranching to hunting, there’s a prejudice against management that involves human interaction.
“Catalina Island can have either a functional, biodiverse and resilient ecosystem or it can have deer,” said Scott Morrison, director of conservation and science for The Nature Conservancy in California, in an interview with SF Gate. “It cannot have both.”
Whitwam disagrees. He says islanders on Catalina value the mule deer, and responsible human management makes more sense than wholesale slaughter.
“Mule deer and all species have value to me,” he says. “I’m a hunter, I see this eradication plan as just a huge waste of resources and protein. And honestly, all to save 12 endemic plants? That’s their argument in a nutshell. But over the last 100 years there have been tens of thousands of goats on the island, thousands of pigs, cattle, aoudad, black buck antelope. Those are all gone now, the endemic plants still remain. The deer numbers are the same as they were in 1948 according to the Conservancy, but the deer are to blame now for ecosystem collapse? That doesn’t math to me. The deer are causing the island to be more prone to fire risk? I can’t begin to make sense of that one. This is all just absurd.”
I began to notice years ago that the restriction and eradication of hunting from public lands gives English aristocratic vibes.
Outstanding reporting on the Santa Rosa precedent. The Setnicka whistleblowing detail is crucial here becuase it shows NPS had data proving minimal impact but proceeded anyway. What really gets me is the hunting prohibition excuse while simultaneously deploying aerial gunfire, that contradiction is almost darkly comedic. The geneticsolation point Vail made about preserving breeding stock is something conservationists would normally champion.