Political Sclerosis

In which a largely absentee California Senate committee becomes its own metaphor

I’ve somewhat downplayed the degree to which my family has become sucked into the politics of California wildlife management in the wake of the mountain lion attack on my nephews, but at this point a report is pretty much unavoidable.

In early 2025, just after Cat Country appeared in the New York Times, I was asked to contribute to the language for California Senate Bill 818, authored by Senator Marie Alvarado-Gil. The bill proposed a five-year experimental pilot program exclusive to El Dorado County, which continues to have statistically outsized issues with its resident mountain lion population (although for the record, it’s far from the only California region with escalating problems—read on…).

Dubbed Taylen and Wyatt’s Law, SB 818 in its original incarnation would enlist a limited number of licensed private hound handlers to assist John Chandler, the El Dorado County Wildlife Specialist, in hazing too-bold-for-comfort mountain lions away from residential areas and livestock zones. By this point anybody who’s paid a lick of attention knows full-well that this works as a non-lethal conditioning technique, and it used to keep a lot of lions out of the landfill before Proposition 117 “outlawed” the practice by implication in 1990.

Yes, you read that right—the same preservationist measure that ostensibly sought to protect mountain lions directly led to far greater numbers of them being slaughtered than occurred prior to their voter-designated status as a “specially protected mammal” (Google A retrospective look at mountain lion populations in California (1906-2018). But the road to hell is still paved with the same naive intentions, and Pollyanna still runs the asphalt crew.

SB 818 was inspired both by the pre-1990 statistics, and also a measure in the state of Washington which recruited private hound handlers to deal with similar issues in the wake of similar policy shifts (read more). Despite the logic and motivation behind it, SB 818 nonetheless faces both a good bit of controversy, and also a quagmire of a political process, including an outright gauntlet of preliminary committee approvals, simply to qualify it for a general vote from the California Assembly. Even then it will take a 4/5ths majority to get it to the governor’s desk.

To cut to the chase, I traveled down to Sacramento in April to testify before the first of this series of committees—Natural Resources and Water, chaired by Senator Monique Limon of Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. Unfortunately, the committee had already totally eviscerated the original language of the bill, and “amended” it by removing the hound hazing entirely and replacing it with a lot of vacuous, repetitious, non-specific verbiage that ultimately can only be described as a non-proposal, not to mention a non-solution.

For example: “The department shall develop and implement a grant program to assist eligible applicants, including local governments, obtain, install, and maintain equipment and other measures to protect livestock and domestic animals and minimize activities that attract mountain lions into communities.”

This is a direct cut-and-paste. All butchery of both language and logic is entirely original.

More to the point, El Dorado County livestock owners are by now well-acquainted with the standard protocols for preventing a lion attack, so in that regard, the revised bill is little more than a reiteration of what’s already standard operating procedure. Meanwhile, the revision also misses the salient point entirely: SB 818 as originally drafted had public safety, not livestock protection, as its chief motivator.

In addition to the fatal head-on attack of my nephews, mountain lion behavior in the county otherwise routinely falls somewhere between the bold and the blase—cats presenting themselves in broad daylight on municipal walking trails, outside public school grounds, outside sliding glass doors in actual housing developments. In March a particularly brazen specimen actually stuck its head through a doggie door in Shingle Springs, a bedroom community of Sacramento bisected by US Highway 50 (here). People are afraid to let their kids ride bikes, afraid to walk their dogs, afraid to go hiking. The state is now advising the public “to refrain from going out hiking or running alone, in particular at dawn or dusk.”

Taylen and Wyatt, of course, were not alone, and they were confronted and attacked at about one in the afternoon. In the aftermath of the incident, we learned that a number of livestock kills had been recorded in the previous weeks in the same general area. Had the protocols in the original draft of SB 818 already been in place, targeted hound hazing would have already been applied, and the odds of a direct attack on two adult-sized humans further reduced. That’s what this bill is supposed to address.

However, despite its massive rural land space, California’s politics remain dominated by its urban and coastal population. Four of the seven committee members represent largely urban and/or coastal communities, and five of these failed to so much as show up to hear testimony at all.

So they didn’t have to look Wyatt in the eye, didn’t have to listen to Senator Alvarado-Gil’s explanation of the issues faced by her constituents in the foothills communities, didn’t have to hear the El Dorado County Agricultural Commissioner’s data on skyrocketing livestock kills, or my own three-minute review of how mountain lion behavior has palpably changed in conjunction with increasingly hands-off policy changes, from the time my brother and I were the ages of Taylen and Wyatt, until now.

The absentee members did not have to listen to their own blistering ass-chewing as delivered by the one member who did show up, Senator Shannon Grove, on both their avoidant cowardice, and the pure audacity of placing district-specific crisis management protocols into the general voting sector in the first place. At which point the committee chair cut in to “correct the record,” by blithely insisting that her district among others did in fact have escalating lion issues, albeit thus far with no human fatalities—at which point I turned to my mother and said, “She’s making our case for us…”

Several dozen supporters showed up on our behalf, most of them El Dorado County residents. A handful of animal advocacy organizations testified in opposition, including the Mountain Lion Foundation, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Cougar Conservancy, also with rank-and-file backers, virtually all of them from outside the county.

Sheri Negri, a founding member of the Mountain Lion Foundation, stated that SB 818 was "illegal," per the ballot proposition that has governed lion management in California for the past 35 years. This is categorically not true, as verified by CDFW's director, Chuck Bonham, to the El Dorado County Board of Supervisors last October. If it were true, SB 818 would not have been proposed in the first place.

In point of fact, the only violation of Proposition 117 regards the 2020 deviation from the statute’s livestock depredation permitting, when Fish and Wildlife under Bonham’s direction caved to pressure from the Mountain Lion Foundation and made an end-run by allowing problem lions to rack up multiple offenses before issuing a lethal permit. Per the specific language of 117, this is supposed to occur immediately upon verification of a single attack.

Secondly, both Negri and Beth Pratt of the National Wildlife Federation wrongly claimed that Taylen and Wyatt's Law in its original form has no basis in wildlife science. Again, categorically untrue--in the past year, two independent studies by career wildlife biologists reported on years-long controlled research on this method exactly, and came to the same conclusion empirically that had long been observed anecdotally: "catch-and-release" pursuit by trained hounds reinforces mountain lion avoidance of both humans and livestock (here and here).

In the end, my family was given the option of endorsing the amended language, or holding the committee to a vote on Taylen and Wyatt’s Law as originally written. We chose the latter.

Which the committee did not have the decency to honor. Instead, it chose to have its cake and also fork it down its own hatch, by acknowledging that a problem exists, but kicking the can down the road to the next committee. In short, it made an end-run, and voted instead on the amended bill as rejected by the original author, Senator Alvarado-Gil, and its official sponsor—the family of Taylen and Wyatt Brooks. Senator Grove and one other committee member held to integrity and voted against the amended version, as a reverse show of support for the bill as first proposed and endorsed.

In another irony, John Chandler was scheduled to appear at the committee hearing as well, but he couldn't, because yet another lethal depredation permit had been issued the day before, for a mountain lion that crossed the multiple-strikes threshold on livestock kills. So while we were testifying in defense of a bill that promotes the welfare of both humans and lions, John was compelled by the state to pursue and kill yet another lion.

Which could well have been preventable, had Taylen and Wyatt's Law already existed. Future attacks on humans are also preventable, but it's going to require a return to real-world management. For the record, even the amended bill is predicted to die with the next committee, Budget and Finance, because it would require an expenditure on the part of an already bankrupt state. Draw your own conclusions as to the intentions of the amendments’ authors.

As a family, we got a firsthand taste of the political process. SB 818 as originally written would not have cost the state a dime—but an aye might have cost the majority of the committee members with either their constituents, or their donors.

And regardless of public safety, actual animal welfare, or reasonable coexistence between the two, political self-preservation appears to be the bottom line.