Santa Cruz County has No Shoot Zones, but shooting goes on there anyway. Shooting in remote areas can be tied to other illegal activities. Also, some people use lead ammunition, which is proven to poison wildlife, including endangered raptors, and cause an environmental hazard.
Bullets can travel up to 5 miles!
We ask that:
- You educate Santa Cruz County residents who reside in No Shoot Zones that shooting is an illegal activity. For example, you could do a mailing. And we ask that the sheriff's department investigate areas where illegal shooting has been reported, by going to the site where it occurred and finding out what happened there.
- You ban lead ammunition in Santa Cruz County.
- You enact stiff fines for people who engage in shooting in No Shoot Zones, or those who use lead ammunition.
Further, we ask that you educate those who have livestock about nonlethal methods of protecting their livestock, such as trained guardian dogs, tall electric fencing, predator-proof housing, and more. When predators are allowed to kill livestock, you are literally "feeding the wild animals," and they can reproduce unsustainably and lose their fear of people. This can cause them to become a danger to children and pets, and hurt our community. Yet, when you don't properly protect livestock and make them easy to kill, and then in turn kill predators who will predictably be attracted to them, you are hurting our ecosystem and the natural predator/prey balance.
Allowing predators to eat domestic animals causes predator numbers to increase and to lose their fear of people, and results eventually in hunts to control them, as is going on in California right now:
http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2013/coyote-contest-02-07-2013.html
http://science.kqed.org/quest/2013/02/06/coyote-killings-a-complex-debate-of-conservation-and-cruelty/
The Santa Cruz Puma Project found that 8 out of 11 mountain lions that died during their study were killed by people due to conflicts with domestic animals.
http://www.gtweekly.com/index.php/santa-cruz-news/santa-cruz-environmental-news/4713-land-of-lions.html
Some resources:
Certified Humane
Predator Friendly Certification
Farming with the Wild -- Resources
Organic Farming & Ranching: Conserving the Land & Wildlife for
Future Generations
