Adoption Offers End Plan to Kill Santa Cruz Island Sheep

VENTURA —  The potential for a government-sponsored slaughter of about 2,500 feral sheep on the east end of Santa Cruz Island has nearly vanished under a flood of offers from citizens to adopt the wild and woolly animals, a top National Park Service official said Thursday.

“An absolutely great thing has happened,” said Tim J. Setnicka, acting Superintendent of Channel Islands National Park. “With all these assertions about us going out there and killing all these lambs and everything, there’s been a huge groundswell of public support to relocate and adopt the sheep.

“There are no plans to go out and randomly start annihilating sheep,” he said.

Concerned about excessive grazing and destruction of rare plants, the park service had left open the option of sending sharpshooters to mow down sheep once the Congress-approved seizure of the island’s 6,200-acre Gherini Ranch is accomplished Feb. 10.

But Setnicka said the slaughter is not going to happen if the park service has control over the sheep’s future on the island and a promising adoption program can be worked out. Just who owns the sheep should be determined legally in the next few weeks, he said.

“I’ve had calls from sheep ranchers who said they would take 300 and another who said he would take 500,” Setnicka said. “We’ve had calls from people who say they’ll help us round them up and others who say they’ll contribute money. The sheep have to leave and people don’t want to see us shoot them.”

Under a tentative park service plan, sheep would be rounded up, herded onto a government landing craft, taken to old cattle holding pens at the Port of Hueneme and given to people who agree not to slaughter them, he said.

If Oxnard attorney Francis Gherini, who owns one-quarter interest in the seized ranch, cannot establish a legal claim to the sheep, the park service will declare them abandoned and ship them off the island to be adopted, Setnicka said.

Gherini said Thursday that the sheep belong to him, his siblings or their estates, not the park service. But he said he would not fight to stop the adoptions.

“No, I wouldn’t waste my time trying to stop him because he couldn’t do it,” said Gherini, the lone holdout of a family that has owned the island ranch for 110 years.

The government bought three-fourths of the ranch from Gherini’s brother and two sisters for $4 million each. But after years of negotiations, Gherini and the park service could not reach agreement on the fair market value of his interest, and Congress authorized seizure of the land last fall.

“If Mr. Setnicka thinks it’s feasible to round them all up and ship them in, I’d like to be there when he does it,” said Gherini, whose family ran an island sheep ranch until 12 years ago. “I don’t think they could get them off. These aren’t tame sheep that you can herd.”

Park officials acknowledged how difficult it could be to round up the sheep--who weigh up to 160 pounds, have excellent sight and sense of smell and are often a difficult prey even for the bow hunters who pay Gherini’s hunting concessionaire to shoot them. The terrain of the island is rugged.

“It’s going to be difficult and it will take time, but we’ll chip away at it,” Setnicka said.

The sheep adoption effort is headed by Kathy Jenks, Ventura County’s animal regulation director, and coordinated nationally by Farm Sanctuary, a nonprofit organization that since 1986 has placed thousands of neutered farm animals with owners who agree not to kill them.

Jenks said she is encouraged by the park service’s current stance, which seems to have changed since last fall when animal rights groups blasted authorities for even considering the slaughter.

“At first they didn’t seem like they wanted to do this,” Jenks said. “But it’s my feeling that Tim wants to make it work.”

Jenks said that news stories about the potential slaughter began to turn things around.

Numerous people called to adopt from five to 200 sheep, she said. “One guy even called to say he’d take 2,000,” she said.

Lorri Bauston, president of Farm Sanctuary, said her group is involved with the Santa Cruz Island adoption because members feared that sheep eradication--similar to that conducted by the Nature Conservancy on the western end of Santa Cruz Island--would be repeated on the east end to restore native plants endangered by scavenging sheep.

She estimated that at least 1,000 sheep can be saved by dozens of local organizations already involved in the adoption effort. And she said she wants to try to place 200 wild pigs that also roam the ranch.

About a dozen wild island horses are the focus of a separate rescue program, she said.