Deer ate his shrubs, so he shot them and left them to rot, California game wardens say

An El Dorado County man was so infuriated by deer eating his landscaping that he shot five of them and left them to rot, California wildlife officers say.

Now, Timothy Joseph Fleischer of Placerville has a poaching conviction on his record.

The case began in October 2018, when an anonymous tipster called the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s CalTIP anti-poaching hotline.

A game warden responded to Fleischer’s home and quickly found three dead does. The warden soon after found two other dead deer on a neighbor’s property. One of them was a fawn, said Department of Fish and Wildlife Capt. Patrick Foy.

Fleischer, 58, told the warden he was protecting his lawn and shrubs from the hungry deer. He told the warden he had first tried shooting near the deer to scare them off, but that didn’t work so he started shooting them in the hindquarters so they would run off and not die on his lawn, Foy said.

Fleischer couldn’t be reached for comment Thursday evening. It’s not clear if he had an attorney.

Last week, Fleischer pleaded no contest or guilty in El Dorado County Superior Court to charges of wasting a game animal, hunting without a license and illegally killing a doe, Foy said.

He was sentenced to three years of probation, $900 in fines, 40 days in jail to be served in “alternative sentencing” and he forfeited his firearms to authorities, Foy said.

He’s not allowed to hunt or possess weapons while on probation and he has to take a hunter’s safety course, Foy said.

But the wildlife officers who arrested Fleischer wanted Californians to know that legal hunting had nothing to do with what they say Fleischer admitted to doing.

“This egregious poaching case is far from anything that could be described as hunting,” Dan Lehman, the assistant chief who oversees CalTIP and California’s hunter education programs, said in a written statement.