About this user
"Not to hurt our humble brethren
is our first duty to them,
but to stop there is not enough.
We have a higher mission
to be of service to them whenever they require it
If you have men who will exclude
any of God's creatures
from the shelter of compassion and pity,
you will have men who will deal likewise
with their fellow men"
-St. Francis of Assisi
Time is now for a non-lethal urban Deer Management
While Japan is infamous for its 1000/yr pseudo-scientific "Research" whaling and 22,000/yr dolphin slaughter, and Canada is notorious for its 300,000/yr Newfoundland seal hunt and the environmentally disastrous Alberta tar sands, the United States has an open secret, just as ugly, of wildlife exploitation that is little known to even those who have been fighting American-style trophy hunting for years.
In name, it is presented to the public by the consistently pro-hunting governments as "urban wildlife management". In fact, it is urban deer slaughter on a massive scale that is spreading like wildfire from city to city across the land. The executioners vary, from expensive sharpshooters who charge $300-$500 per deer, to cruel captive-bolt operators who attempt to shoot steel bolts into the thrashing head of the victim, often missing the brain and hitting the eyes, and, most despicable of all, bow-hunters, whose statistical non-lethal wounding rate approximates 50% of all deer shot. While the sharpshooters and captive-bolters do it for money, the bow hunters do it for fun, pure and simple. And by urban deer "culling" by how-hunters, we're talking about them shooting deer with arrows in people's backyards. In fact, almost all of the urban-deer-slaughters-by-bow-hunters are driven by the bow-hunting lobby/community/industry.
More often than not, the deer "overpopulation" problem, if/when it exists, is deliberately cultivated by the hunting community for an excessiveness of deer for hunting purposes, which then offers itself as the solution to the "problem" as a "favor" to the public. Case in point - The Trexler Wildlife Preserve in Allentown PA. After 70 years of no-hunting in the preserve with respect to the dying wish of General Trexler, they reopened the preserve to bow-hunting in the name of ecological protection of the preserve. On opening day, I went into the preserve with local activists Carol Loomis and Cheryl Baker, admidst hoards of hunters hefting lethal-looking compound bows and quivers of broad-head arrows. And what did we see? If I were blind-folded and driven into the preserve, then have the blind-fold removed, I would have guessed that I was in a farm. Acres of forest had been plowed down, with food-plots of deer clover planted there instead, row on row. Deer, when well nourished, will maximize their reproductive potential, giving birth to twins and triplets instead of none or singlets. And this is what the bow-hunters wanted, and did - wreck the forest, plant food-plots, max out the deer reproductive rate, claim ecological damage by deer overpopulation, offer themselves as saviors of the preserve, go in and shoot deer with bow-and-arrow. And we saw some of the results. To find the perfect solution, the first thing to realize is that culling as a population control measure does not work. Take a piece of land with a carry capacity of, say 8 does. If it contains 10 does, their total fawn crop would be around 3 fawns, totaling 13 deer at the end of the year. Whereas, if the 10 does were reduced to 5 by culling, the remaining 5 does would produce around 8 fawns in total, resulting again in 13 deer at the end of the year. This is called the Compensatory Rebound Effect (CRE). The hunters know this, but the public does not, thus allowing the hunters to have their self-perpetuating way.
The civilized solution for the Trexler Preserve, even if there is ecological damage due to deer, is to first eliminate the food-plots, and practice birth-control of deer, as we do cats, dogs and humans. The technology of Immuno-Contraception (IC) is mature, technically ready for field application, and approved by the FDA (2007). Unfortunately, all governments on all levels, without a single exception that I've seen - and I've seen a lot in my last 6 Compassion for Animals Road Expeditions (CARE tours - see www.HOPE-CARE.org) - are not only pro-hunting, but run by hunters. The state policy of New Jersey , for example, is that of the 11 voting members of its Fish and Game Department at least 6 must be hunters, and in fact, all 11 were hunters the last time I checked. Hunters dread IC like the plague, and the governments have denied real world IC application since Day 1.