This past year there has been an increase in news articles and letters to the Editor complaining about problems within the urban area involving wild animals.
Problems particularly involve small mammals such as skunks, opossums, raccoons and coyotes.
They were investigated separately. The law does not allow an alternative action of transporting wild animals to an animal shelter for later transfer to private citizens. Even state licensed wildlife rehabilitators are not allowed to accept healthy wild animals for release back into urban or rural areas. To do otherwise, simply moves the problem to someplace else, creates the opportunity to spread disease, disrupts the habitat of other wild animals, and violates California law. The Department of Fish and Game noted that random relocations of wild animals can do significant damage to existing wild animals in the area of relocation.