Armed “ground-based specialists” are being allowed to kill off the mule deer population on Catalina Island with permission granted by California’s Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Meeteater.com noted that the eradication, dubbed the Catalina Island Restoration Project, is designed to occur over a number of years and is promoted by “a nonprofit called the [Santa] Catalina Island Conservancy, which owns 42,000 acres on Catalina—about 80% of the total island.”
A summary of the plan, published by the California Fish and Wildlife, says, in part:
The Project will conserve, restore, protect, enhance, and assist in the recovery of California native wildlife, and the habitat upon which they depend. Mule deer are native to most of the state of California but were historically absent from Catalina and the other Channel Islands. Mule deer were intentionally introduced to Catalina in the 1920s. These introduced mule deer on Catalina have reduced Catalina rare and endemic vegetation cover due to mule deer selectively browsing on rare and endemic plants. This allows invasive plant species an opportunity to outcompete these rare and endemic plant species and contributes to habitat type conversion across Catalina.
The eradication of the mule deer population is occurring in various stages, with “professional shooting with bait/water sites” and “nocturnal ground shooting” during year one.
Year two will use “aerial net capture” and “ground shooting with detection dogs [and] helicopter support,” and the method for removal will continue to change as the years of the project go by.
In early August 2026, Safari Club International and others asked the Los Angeles County Superior Court to block the eradication plan.
Protestors with the Coalition Against the Slaughter of Catalina Deer hold signs as island visitors arrive on the Catalina Express boat in Avalon, Catalina Island Monday, Oct. 30, 2023. Catalina Island residents formed the group to stop the Catalina Island Conservancy from proceeding with a plan to have all 2,000 mule deer on the island shot and killed. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
However, on September 3, 2026, the Guardian noted that “a judge…paved the way for the island’s conservancy to kill nearly all the island’s 2,000 deer.”
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and the director of global marketing for Lone Star Hunts. He holds a PhD in Military History with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. He enjoys reading Philosophy and novels by Jack Carr and Nelson DeMille. He is a lever action man in an AR-15 world. Follow him on X: @awrhawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.