Article published November 22, 2009
Deer culling opponents need to get over it
White-tailed deer do not read either news stories or yard signs, or listen to television or radio, or watch blurry, grainy video with misleading subtitles made by a hysterical, out-of-state animal-rights group that self-righteously claims higher moral ground.
White-tailed deer, however, do a grand job of reproducing.
They evolved over time to annually put out new generations in such numbers that would offset deaths to predators such as cougars, wolves, coyotes, bobcats, and bears, and to offset deaths by harsh winter weather, parasites, bacterial and viral infections, even lack of food.
Throughout the species’ history the passing of wild deer rarely if ever could be called peaceful or pretty, or humane. Even if a deer outlived all else, its teeth eventually would fail, and it would slowly starve to death from inability to sufficiently browse.
The foregoing basics seem to have been overlooked in the emotional, controversial run-up to a decision before Ottawa Hills village council tomorrow night about whether to amend its 1940 no-hunting law.
That amendment has been proposed to enable the village to consider implementing a wildlife management plan which, if also approved by council and the Ohio Division of Wildlife, could lead to very restricted control of a burgeoning deer population in the 2½-square-mile village.
To listen to some of the polarized, bitter arguments being forwarded in opposition, you would think that ranks of slavering snipers lurk at the village limits, salivating at the thought of slaying one innocent Bambi after another — and maybe even callously enjoying it.
Get real.
In fact, no contract has been signed with anyone or any firm to do any killing of any deer. Indeed, the village has not even budgeted any money to do any controlling of any kind. But such details get lost in the jumping to conclusions.
The village administration should get an “A” and a gold star for carefully doing its homework on this issue, even to the point of hiring an ecologist to assay deer browsing damage [confirmed in at least three of four sites].
The village even set up a trail camera at a Central Avenue bridge site across from Wildwood Preserve Metropark; the camera shows a deer here or a deer there coming and going, but no mass migration into the village from the park of browse-seeking herds. The village further has engaged and quizzed biologists, deer managers, and other principals, consulted with villages and park systems that already have confronted the deer issue.
The result has led to a suggestion that perhaps a cull of the village herd is needed. Just that has been the inevitable conclusion in town after town, village after village from Cape Cod to California for 20 years and more. But each “new” community acts as if it has to reinvent the wheel and proceed to spin that wheel endlessly.
While that wheel-spinning goes on and on, the deer keep doing their thing. They are doing it right now in Ottawa Hills — breeding, that is. The rut, or breeding time, is at its peak even as council mulls and neighbors grumble.
What the rut means is that doing nothing about the village deer herd, as so vociferously campaigned by the “no” folks, only will delay the day of reckoning — and the longer the delay, the more expensive the solution.
Some simple math about deer reproduction illustrates it. Last January, before bred does dropped their fawns for 2009, the agreed-upon number of deer in the village was 80. A 30 percent increase was assumed, based on the track record of free-ranging, hunted deer populations in Ohio.
So now the number in the village is 1.3 times 80, or 104. Right? Wrong.
Deer numbers actually increase immediately at fawn-drop by up to 70 percent, and those fawns that survive the vulnerable early months boost the herd by fall by at least 40 to 50 percent a year. This is in a no-hunting, no-predator, no-winterkill situation, as found in Ottawa Hills. [Lots of fawns die early on for lots of reasons.]
So even if you accept 104 deer in the village right now, by next fall, if nothing is done, there will be 145 to 156 deer. In the fall of 2011 there will be 203 to 234. By fall of 2012, 284 to 351. That’s a lot of landscaping browsed.
If you do not believe that deer can do this, look north a few miles to the University of Michigan’s 1,146-acre George Reserve, a biological station where deer have been studied intensively since 1928 and coincidentally almost the size of Ottawa Hills. In a five-year study begun in 1928, six deer had become 162 by 1933. Another study in 1975 began with 10 deer, which by 1980 had grown to 212.
Such colossal reproductive potential is why state wildlife agency managers across the country, including in Ohio, hope as many hunters as possible go afield each deer season and kill the limit. Ohio hunters have been killing about a quarter million deer a year in recent years and that barely has pared the wild herd statewide. It is like keeping your foot on a giant coiled spring and hoping your foot doesn’t get tired.
Such colossal reproductive potential also is why sooner or later, something will have to be done in Ottawa Hills — and maybe other neighboring communities, maybe even some metroparks — once the deer herds reach what is politely called social carrying capacity. The latter means when enough people get fed up enough to say enough is enough.
As for political correctness, get past it. Academic, moral, and philosophical debates over the humaneness of culling a deer by a bullet in the brain — up to now and for at least the immediate future the most efficient, most humane, most cost-effective control — can be endless. That is especially so when the debate is fueled by willfully dissembling video that can lead an underinformed viewer to bogus conclusions.
Yes, culling is a messy business. Especially when it is rubbed in your face. So, how would you like the scenes from a slaughterhouse rubbed in your face?
Consider that in these United States, for our tables we annually kill 34.4 million cattle, 956,000 calves, 116.5 million hogs, 2.56 million sheep and lambs, 59,000 goats, and 4,900 bison in 818 “processing plants.” And that doesn’t count 9.075 billion chickens, 271 millions turkeys, and 24.1 million ducks. Those are federal figures for 2008, which set a record at 50.4 billion pounds of red meat [beef, veal, pork, lamb, mutton] produced.
Care to look up how slaughterhouses put animals to death, if you think an explosive bullet from a high-powered rifle in a deer’s brain is so horrid? No, we prefer to be blissfully ignorant, grab our little sanitized blister-packs of meat from the grocer’s shelf and grill and gnaw away. At least any culled deer would go to feed the needy, speaking of red meat.
Four days’ hence, most all of us will sit down and give thanks with our families, and tuck into the turkey.
Don’t think for a minute that Old Mr. Tom [actually Young Tender Tom] on his last day slipped into a feather bed, down comforter tucked under his chin, bade a sad but fond farewell to his gathered, teary-eyed kin, then drifted peacefully off into the Last, Final Sleep.
It doesn’t happen that way, folks. And a head-in-the-sand approach will not fix the deer problem in Ottawa Hills or anywhere else. Doing nothing is one answer, but it is dead wrong. Time and deer biology say so.
Contact Steve Pollick at:spollick@theblade.comor 419-724-6068.
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