With shootings in the Pico neighborhood, a constituency increasingly up in arms over the homeless population, Farmers’ Market lawsuits, a defecting chief of police and overcrowded schools revving up, city officials once again find themselves preoccupied with the humane treatment of and euthanasia debates surrounding its squirrels.
The pesky little rodents have again burrowed their way into the public consciousness, and City Hall’s purse strings, by continuing to do what squirrels do — dig burrows, scavenge for food and procreate. Would we expect any less? The problem is they do it well and haven’t really taken a liking to the city’s subtle persuasion tactics to have them treated for fleas and disease, and for their human counterparts to halt the handouts. They continue to reproduce in Palisades Park at a rate that is both alarming and threatening, according to LA County health officials.
If city leaders leaned any further left in trying to appease the residents and animal rights groups pressuring them to treat the dangerous squirrels rather than eradicate them, they would be doing cartwheels. In effect, they are. City Hall faces the same rampant rodent population and their accompanying threat to human health it did before attempting to stave off the county with a pilot program, whereby they treated the animals for fleas, posted signs in the parks instructing the public not to feed the squirrels and handed out literature on the pitfalls of sharing morsels with fuzzy tailed friends.
Six months after entrusting Mary Cummins from Animal Advocates to enforce the education and birth control program, there is no accounting for how many squirrels were treated.
City Hall has essentially exhausted its options of non-lethal solutions and worn out its welcome with a county health department threatening to sue. Santa Monica is the first city that fought bucked-tooth and claw with the county over having to be compliant with the latter’s code on rodent population control.
The time has come to shake the sand out of our hair and rub our eyes amid the sun. Stepping back into reality, there is a population of uncontrolled rodents overtaking our parks and threatening public safety.
Let’s take our nuts and go home. City leaders have fought the good fight, but the squirrels that they’ve struggled to save haven’t cooperated. It’s not in their nature.
We commend City Hall on its efforts on behalf of concerned residents and animal rights activists, as well as its own council members, but the time has come to do what’s best for the whole population. The vaunted bluff atop the PCH weakens with every additional burrow. The squirrels carry fleas thought to cause bubonic plague. Their access to humans’ discarded food creates an unnatural ecosystem in which they were not intended to thrive, for they have no natural predators to contain them ... enter the county health department.
To its credit, City Hall has turned tail and reverted to its original plan, to essentially, trap, gas and feed — trapping the squirrels in containers, euthanising them humanely with carbon monoxide and recycling them as food for injured birds set to be released into the wild. Working in conjunction with the wildlife center at Cal State Bakersfield, the method is that preferred by both the American Veterinary Association and the USDA Wildlife Service.
It’s time to let those charged with keeping our parks and open spaces safe do their jobs. Let’s allow the county to enforce its health code. Let’s allow the city to comply. And let’s allow Lefty “I’m not a bad guy” Ayers of Heritage Wildlife Management to do his job rounding up the rodents without fears of sabotaged traps and activist obstacles.
After all, it’s in our nature to foster an environment in which we can thrive, too.
