Just weeks after California officials gave the green light to wipe out the island’s entire mule deer herd, a coalition of hunting groups, wildlife advocates, and island lovers has fired back with a formal legal challenge. As we reported in our piece on the CDFW’s January 30 approval of the Catalina Island Conservancy’s Resource Management Plan, the five-year eradication scheme was sold as essential “restoration.” Critics (including us) called it overkill when decades of data and a highly successful 2024 hunting season proved otherwise.
Now that pushback has teeth.
Just last week, a ragtag group of conservationists and hunting organizations that include the Coalition to Save Catalina Island Deer, California Deer Association, Safari Club International, Howl for Wildlife, California Rifle & Pistol Association, and California Bowmen Hunters/State Archery Association banded together and filed suit in Los Angeles County Superior Court. Their core argumentremains rooted in the fact that CDFW improperly granted a CEQA exemption to the CIC’s plan without requiring a full Environmental Impact Report. The exemption was signed not by the Director, as state law requires, but by deputy director Joshua Grover. Plaintiffs say the project carries obvious significant impacts, including risks to federally protected golden and bald eagles from helicopter netting operations, and deserves proper study, alternatives analysis, and public input.
As one could imagine, the lawsuit doesn’t mince words. It accuses the CIC of hiding an “ulterior motive” of total eradication behind vague “restoration” language and demands an immediate stay halting all work under the permit.
“A full CEQA review would be appropriate for any project this size,” Attorney Melinda Benson, a former island resident assisting the case said. “We don’t believe it is appropriate to proceed under this exemption.”
The timing couldn’t be more pointed. Just last month the CIC and CDFW were touting their “science-based” ground-based shooting plan (after the 2024 helicopter-sharpshooting fiasco was scrapped amid public outrage). Court filings now reveal helicopter-deployed aerial nets and tracking dogs are still on the table, which are exactly the kind of heavy-handed tactics locals and hunters feared.
This legal fight lands on the heels of our earlier coverage that plainly displayed how the 2024 hunting season produced a 22% population reduction with just 754 tags — the most effective harvest on record. Yet CDFW and the CIC continue to insist recreational hunting “failed,” ignoring both the data and the fact that deer were deliberately brought to the island in the 1930s as a hunting resource and have been woven into Catalina’s identity ever since.
The case is currently pending with no hearing date set, but the stakes remain clear. Either the courts force a real environmental review and consideration of sustainable hunting alternatives, or the Conservancy will be allowed to proceed with what many see as an expensive, unnecessary, and culturally tone-deaf eradication.
