Pismo Beach‘s squirrel situation sounds dire.
At this point, the city’s only options are guns or gas.
Poison is out—and has been out for two years, thanks to a combination of sympathetic City Council members and a state worried about the rest of its animal ecosystem. And that’s part of the problem. The population is loving it. Lots of baby squirrel births have helped the species rebound from the poisonous cliff.
And as the little devils multiply, digging into the beach berg’s picturesque oceanside bluffs, the rate of erosion has also multiplied.
“Their tunneling moves water through and out of the bluffs and helps accelerate the collapse of the bluffs,” Public Works Director Rosemarie Gaglione told the council on April 16.
The problem is so bad that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) said something. As in, get your shit together. These cute little fuckers are about to take your city down.
Filling their homes with carbon monoxide gas isn’t working because the gas just disperses out the bluff-side holes. Trapping squirrels in the spring and sterilizing them isn’t really approved in the U.S. Trapping them and relocating them is illegal without a permit. Options are slim!
“I believe … the only option we have at this point, is shooting or gas chamber,” Gaglione said.
Maybe we can have a little fun game for the kids! A Whack-A-Squirrel Program? Target-shooting practice along the ocean?
“I’m sure the police chief doesn’t want the shooting of squirrels in our parks,” Councilmember Stacy Inman said.
That’s no fun! Boring.
That leaves one option: The gas chamber! Someone’s going to have to trap the squirrels, lock them in a box, and fill it with carbon monoxide. Sounds brutal. But, it’s an approved method of killing humans convicted of murder, so it should be good enough for the destructive ground squirrel.
Maybe if Pismo Beach figures it out, it can send out a memo to property owners dealing with the same menace. Tomatoes and dahlias that disappear; holes dug under foundations and everywhere else, too; and little squirrels everywhere.
Shoplifting also seems to be a menace. It’s gotten to the point where shop owners are taking matters into their own hands.
We’ve got our very own viral social media star here in San Luis Obispo: Adam Kemp who owns Thrifty Beaches. A video of him chasing a man on a bike through the streets of downtown, dodging cars, and making other questionable decisions ends with the thief dropping a jacket he took from Kemp’s store. It’s got hundreds of thousands of thumbs ups on Instagram—as well as a slew of detractors, including one who emailed me with his hot take!
It’s easy to criticize Kemp. All of that danger for a jacket?
The thing is, though, it’s not just one jacket. Kemp said that he averages about one shoplifter a day. That’s untenable if you’re a business owner—I don’t care how progressive you are. Enabling loss is a good way to go out of business. In the case of Hope Chest Emporium in Atascadero, owner Karen McNamara said she loses $1,000 per month thanks to sticky fingers.
What’s a $5 ring? What’s a $25 jacket? How about a pair of sneakers and a ball cap? A $50 purse? It adds up. But if it doesn’t add up to $950, it doesn’t add up to much in the eyes of the law (at least it didn’t until January)—which law enforcement has pointed to as a problem since 2014 (I know, eye roll), when we reduced the penalties for certain lower-level crimes such as theft because we had too many people in our jails and not enough space to house them.
“We saw a large increase in crime and the property crime type of stuff,” SLO Deputy Police Chief Fred Mickel said. “There was no deterrent. There were these folks that were out committing these crimes repetitively” with very few consequences.
If places like the Madonna Inn and Hope Chest and Thrifty Beaches are all relying on social media to find the people who steal from them so they can get their shit back, it seems like a big problem.
It doesn’t matter whether someone is down on their luck, homeless, or in need of a jacket, stealing from someone is a no-go. Criticizing a shop owner because they felt they had no choice but to deal with it on their own because of a lack of law enforcement tools is also not the way forward.
Maybe the recently passed Proposition 36 will help business owners with this problem. Maybe law enforcement now has the tools it needs to help deter and also punish petty crimes like shoplifting. Maybe. Maybe not.
You know what else we need to punish? Other than the current Trump administration, I’m really not sure. Every time the great orange grandpa signs another executive order, I just roll my eyes. How many will there be? One for every day of his current term? How can you keep up?
Thankfully, nonprofits like Los Padres ForestWatch have a keen eye trained on their interests. Like preventing clear-cutting and wholesale logging in Los Padres National Forest. That’s a cause I can get behind. Trump can take his logging executive order and shove it. Δ
The Shredder can only shove with words. Send some to shredder@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Apr 17-27, 2025.