If an animal happens to stray into your backyard, call the SPCA, call your vet, call PETA, call the Zoo if you must, but whatever you do, don't call law enforcement. If you do, by the time they leave you'll have a dead animal in your hands, its body riddled with bullets.
Police Departments, Sheriff's Departments and Fish and Game all are notorious for shooting as the easy way out when handling animals.
An alarm is triggered by mistake in a house in Oakland, and police go to investigate. They enter through the small gate in the front yard and the house pet, an 11-year-old arthritic dog, comes around to see what's going on and barks at them a couple of times. Fearing for their lives, the police shoot and kill the family dog. The same police chase a lost baby deer in East Oakland, corner it in someone's house, and because they consider it a safety issue, they kill it. It takes seven shots from a 40-caliber Glock to accomplish the heroic task.
Two coyotes are killed in Golden Gate Park by San Francisco's finest, because they might become a danger to people walking their pit bulls.
A lady sniper from the Palo Alto police department uses a high-powered rifle to kill a mountain lion sleeping on a tree branch. A police spokesperson says they did it because it posed a danger to some children playing in a schoolyard three miles away.
These are just a few examples of the "easy solution," and it happened again on Dec. 1, in Half Moon Bay, where Fish and Game wardens shot and killed two mountain lion cubs.
The cubs as it was, were hunkered down in somebody's backyard in the outskirts of town. They were there Friday and got shooed away, but came back the following day. These were two 9-month-old cubs, very thin for their age, and looking confused and disoriented. According to the nonprofit Mountain Lion Foundation, because mountain lion cubs stick with their mother 12-18 months, these two were probably orphaned.
Enter the wardens.
Just like Fish and Game commissioner Daniel W. Richards, who took a trip to Idaho, chased a mountain lion for three hours with a pack of dogs, and then bravely shot it out of a tree, Fish and Game wardens are basically hunters. And despite the thin veneer of poetic window dressing that is used to describe the "sport" of hunting, such as handed down traditions, the fresh air in the woods, and the so called "harvesting" of game, for a "sport" hunter, the bottom line is the "thrill of the kill". It's all about the adrenaline rush as they slowly squeeze the trigger, and some innocent wildlife creature who a moment ago was moving around unaware, crumples to the ground dead, or that was flying peacefully in search of food, is shot and plummets to earth.
Bringing reminiscences of an old John Wayne movie, it was reported that Fish and Game gave the cubs 24 hours to clear out. A head-scratching notion, if one considers the question of how would the cubs know that they had until sundown to get out of town. So when the cubs were still there after the deadline had expired, it's not surprising that the wardens decided that it was too risky to try to tranquilize them. The risk being that these two listless animals might scurry away a few yards until the drug took effect, a move that I guess would face the wardens with a puzzling and life threatening situation. Of course, it didn't occur to them to give these starving cubs some hamburger laced with a sedative, and then fully tranquilizing them. That would have required wasting a lot of time exercising some creative thinking and the use of logic.
So, with every reasonable option that a protected species is entitled to, off the table, and with the predictable old song and dance announcement that they posed public safety concerns, the wardens walked up to the cubs, expertly raised their guns, and they shot and killed them. Which I am sure made the wardens' day, because it added a little "sport" to their jobs.
Who was it that wrote about killing animals for "sport": "Though the boys throw stones at the frogs in sport, the frogs don't die in sport, they die in earnest."