Killing the Life at Mile Square Park

* Several signs in Mile Square [Regional] Park state: “All recreation areas are considered wildlife sanctuaries.”

The David L. Baker golf course and the wildlife preserve are recreation areas. Therefore, they are wildlife sanctuaries.

However, county planner Richard Adler says that the red foxes, inhabitants of Mile Square Park long before either of the golf courses was created, must be eliminated (July 22).

Was this the plan all along? He indicates, obviously on his own authority, that the foxes are “more of a pest like rodents or groundhogs.”

The Encyclopedia Britannica, however, says red foxes eat mice and rabbits and are “highly beneficial in controlling undesirable rodents.”

But let them run through the hallowed grounds of a golf course, where only golfers can tread, and they become vermin.

Adler has eliminated model airplanes and race cars, the Boy Scouts and other groups from the park. Now he even wants to keep the foxes from the wildlife preserve, a place apparently which must be preserved from wildlife rather than for wildlife.

The foxes, left undisturbed, come out only at night. In all the years I’ve been walking in the triangle section of the park, I’ve only seen them out once, in the early morning.

They don’t attack humans; we frighten them. We’ve already lost too much of Mile Square Park to special interests. Let’s not lose this last bit of wildlife that still lives there.

MARY KAY CROUCH

Fountain Valley