Mike Rogers at CBS Los Angeles says a new fight is brewing off the Southern California coast, because wildlife officials and the Catalina Island Conservancy want to remove every mule deer on Catalina Island, and critics are arguing the plan is extreme, risky, and flat-out wrong for a place where deer have become part of the scenery for generations.
Rogers explains the basic tension in a way that makes the stakes easy to understand: the Conservancy and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife describe the deer as a non-native species that’s chewing up the island’s plants and slowly unraveling a fragile ecosystem, while activists and some Los Angeles County leaders are asking why the answer has to be a full wipeout instead of a smaller, controlled herd.
Tony Kurzweil at KTLA 5 frames it as a major state-approved move that would eliminate roughly 2,000 nonnative deer, with the Conservancy arguing that the island’s native plants can’t recover as long as deer pressure stays high…