There are some glaring inconsistencies in this story. First, as an ODFW agent reported to me, "It's hard to see how they could have been accidentally trapped in two separate cages." When asked about the suggestion, made in the media, that the water level of the dam simply dropped 4 feet and thus pulled at the ropes, this same agent shook his head and said, "The odds of both cages closing accidentally at the same time under those circumstances are slim to none." He pointed out that if one cage had closed, even just a moment before the other, the sea lions in the other cage would have fled the trap and gone back into the water. He said I could quote him on that, and so I am.
So if an ODFW agent is skeptical about that, then how can we not be?
The second inconsistency is this: The temperature was just not that hot. Sea lions breed in Southern California. They sit in the hot sun all day long down there. They don't die of heat prostration, the way a dolphin might if it were beached and could not get back into the water. It just doesn't happen in temperatures like the ones we experienced the day they died. And, they just weren't in the traps during enough daylight to hurt them. By the time the fishermen started showing up out there to fish near the base of the ladders, as they do all weekend long, the sea lions almost had to already be dead. Because someone would have noticed them over there in the traps otherwise, and no one reported that they did. If they'd been over-heating, they would have been very loud and noticeable.
The fishermen would have begun arriving very early in the morning. Before it would have been warm at all.
And even if they had been in those traps all morning long, till they were discovered at 11:30 that morning, IT NEVER GOT HOT ENOUGH TO KILL A SEA LION ALL THAT DAY.
Oh please don't tell me people are just going to buy this ridiculous story and move on as if we weren't being completely lied to on this. We deserve better. We deserve the truth.
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