If you ask Jon Fischer, he'll tell you point-blank that nature isn't always pretty, and that people's efforts to save California's cute, cuddly animals don't always have the heart-warming endings of Disney movies.
In fact, the best of intentions often go sadly awry, and the fox, goat or deer the public is trying to save ends up in a zoo, or even dies. Or an adorable creature is saved, but smaller animals that it preys upon hover dangerously closer to extinction.
So Fischer, a wildlife biologist in one of the most populous regions in the nation, is disheartened by the recent Bambi-esque tale of the red foxes "rescued" from their den hours before cars started whizzing by on a new stretch of the Costa Mesa Freeway.
He and many of his colleagues at the state Department of Fish and Game say the episode is a sad commentary on the state of affairs in California, where emotion often overrules science when it comes to management of wild animals.
"We don't have the resources as society to take care of every animal that is born. That's not the way nature works anyway," said Fischer, who works in the department's Southern California office. "People can go around rallying to save one or two little animals and feel good about themselves and say their job is done, but what we are really doing is winning one battle, while we are losing the entire war."
The real wildlife crisis, they say, is the sweeping losses of California's endangered species and habitat to development and urban pressures. And they believe that the intense efforts to remove the Costa Mesa foxes--33 officials working an equivalent of 145 work days at a cost of $25,000--would have been more wisely spent fighting that difficult battle.
"That fox species needs our help like a fish needs a bicycle. They are the most adaptive four-legged carnivore in the world," Fischer said. "But there are animals that need our help or we are going to lose them, and they are virtually ignored."
More and more, wildlife management in Southern California, where man and nature frequently collide, is a strange mix of public pressure, politics and science. The result can be unpredictable and disappointing to all parties involved.
Take Coconino the bear.
Last year, a veterinarian in Big Bear tried to keep an orphaned bear cub that he said hikers had dropped off at his office.
