Hunters and pot growers are once again at odds.  A summit meeting in Eureka brought representatives of various County Boards of Supervisors, Fish and Game, and environmental groups to a meeting hosted at the Red Lion hotel by Mendocino County Black-Tailed Deer Association which claimed that marijuana farmers are in part to blame for the decline of the deer population in the B zone.

Click on map to enlarge and see B zone

According to the Willits News,

Northwestern California’s “B Zone,” known as California’s “deer factory,” stretches along the coast from the Oregon border to Mendocino and Glen counties, and from I-5 on the east to the Pacific Ocean.

“If you want to find world-class blacktail bucks with antler spreads of 25 to 28 inches or more, this is historically the best place in the world to go,” says Paul Trouette, president of the Mendocino County Blacktail Deer Association.

The Tehema County Daily News adds,

…between 1989 and 2009 the harvest of bucks in the B-Zone has dropped 57 percent, in large part due to a dramatic decline in the region’s deer herd. The 2000 harvest of bucks in Mendocino County was 1,256, a decline of 3,976 bucks per year since the 1950’s.

The decline in deer in B-Zone has cut down the number of hunters in the B-zone, where the annual deer hunt pumps an estimated $35 million a year into the region’s economy when all is well.

Among the factors causing the decline, the group discussed “the poaching and wanton use of pesticides due to proliferation of illegal marijuana gardens on public wildlands as the primary causes behind the decline in the blacktail deer population.”