ShareThisGame wardens across California are finding that hard economic times can be deadly for animals. They're being killed, captured and sold on the black market or butchered for valuable body parts in unprecedented numbers, state officials said.
The illegal trapping and sale of wildlife is more difficult than ever to prevent because the number of game wardens has steadily dwindled due to budget cuts, said Nancy Foley, chief of enforcement for the California Department of Fish and Game.
"What we're seeing is a tremendous increase in the amount of poaching for profit," Foley said. "It's across the board, from reptiles and amphibians to abalone, bear, deer. Every wildlife species ... in the state is being illegally commercialized."
The illegal sale of California wildlife and wildlife parts generates an estimated $100 million a year, second only to the illegal drug trade, according to department officials.
The problem is not expected to improve, with California facing a $24.3 billion budget deficit that, among other things, may result in closing 219 state parks and laying off the rangers who patrol them.
Among the cases game wardens have investigated:
-- In late May, 11 people were arrested and 120 citations were issued in Sonoma and Mendocino counties after an elaborate ring of abalone poachers was discovered.
-- In February, five antelope were fatally shot near Susanville, in northeastern California, by someone driving along a country road. The shooter just left the animals, two of which were pregnant, one with twins, Foley said.
-- In 2007, Redding undercover agents arrested Huong Tovan, 54, of San Diego and charged him with soliciting the killing of bears in Shasta County so he could buy their gallbladders. A gallbladder-processing operation was discovered when wardens arrested Tovan, who had tickets to fly to Southeast Asia, Foley said. Bear gallbladders are used for medicinal purposes there and can fetch $2,000 an ounce.
-- In Sacramento, a man was arrested after investigators used DNA evidence to identify the meat from 28 separate deer that had been shot in Calaveras, El Dorado and Placer counties, Foley said. He was selling the carcasses for up to $150 apiece.
Fish and Game spokesman Patrick Foy said that over the past eight years, profiteers have illegally taken vast quantities of freshwater clams, abalone, salmon, turtles, snakes and amphibians and put them up for sale in food markets, including San Francisco's Chinatown, or sold them to collectors.
The penalty for poaching deer and waterfowl in California is a maximum six months in county jail and a $1,000 fine. Many poachers have gotten off with barely a slap on the wrist, Foy said. He said some of the most egregious deer poachers have been fined as little as $150 and given probation.
Studies have shown that wildlife officers catch only between 1 percent and 5 percent of all violators.
California has only 230 game wardens -- down from 325 in 2001 -- to cover 159,000 square miles of land, including 1,100 miles of coastline. State fish and game wardens also have the authority to safeguard state wildlife in federally protected waters as far as 200 miles out to sea.
But even with fewer wardens, 14,543 citations were issued last year for a variety of offenses including poaching or the illegal sale of animals and animal parts. That's compared with 7,571 citations in 2001.
"Over the last year and a half, we've seen a marked increase in poaching and in people just killing animals and leaving them there for no apparent reason," said Foley, a game warden for 22 years. "I don't think it is a need to put food on the table. It's usually for greed and money and because people know we have a shortage of game wardens...."
California has the nation's fewest game wardens per capita, Foley said. Florida, which has a similar marine component but a lot less land and fewer people, has 750 game wardens. Texas has 550 wardens, she said.
Poaching has thus far not been a major problem in the California State Parks, said spokesman Roy Stearns, but that could change. The latest deficit reduction proposal by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger would cut, within two years, the annual $150 million in general funds the park system receives. That would mean laying off 1,500 to 2,000 maintenance workers, park superintendents and rangers.
Poaching "certainly could become a concern if we reduced law enforcement and some people decided to take advantage of the situation," Stearns said.
Elizabeth Goldstein, president of the California State Parks Foundation, said closing the parks would endanger wildlife and the ecosystem because criminals could not be kept out.
The lack of rangers and wardens would also presumably give free rein to the international black market, which preys on California's natural resources.
"We have some species that you can't find anywhere else in the world," Foley said. "We don't have enough of them to allow people to just come here and take them."
(E-mail Peter Fimrite at pfimrite(at)sfchronicle.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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