Public Menace

There's only one way to protect yourself, your family, and native ecosystems from the most dangerous and destructive wild animal in North America, an animal responsible for maiming and killing hundreds of humans each year, an animal that wipes out whole forests along with most of their fauna. You have to kill it with guns.

I'm talking about the white-tailed deer. In what Gary Alt, one of the nation's most respected wildlife biologists, calls “the greatest mistake ever made in wildlife management,” deer are being allowed to overpopulate to the point of destroying the ecosystems they're part of and depend on. The annual mortality of roughly 1.5 million deer via collisions on the nation's highways doesn't make a dent, save in motor vehicles and their operators—damage that costs the insurance industry about $1.1 billion a year.

There are major or minor deer problems in all 50 states—if not with whitetails then with blacktails, mule deer, elk, and such aliens as axis deer. In virtually every case the reason is that natural predators have been eliminated or reduced to the point where they can't effect control.

The situation is especially grim in the East. No state is worse than Pennsylvania, but vast tracts in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia have been stripped of low vegetation. There are so many deer in South Carolina that bag limits are set by the day rather than by the season. On most of the coastal plain you can kill as many bucks as you want—every day for 140 days, using dogs, if you so choose. (The joke is that the deer are so stunted that the dogs retrieve.) Despite this superabundance, hunters burn and plant private land to encourage even more deer. Georgia, which also allows hunting with dogs in some areas, is so overrun with deer that it has set a seasonal bag limit of 12 (only two of which may have antlers) during two and a half months of rifle hunting. And yet, in order to manipulate national forestland to make room for even more deer, the state's Department of Natural Resources opposes federal wilderness designation.

The American public doesn't accept the fact that sport hunting is the only solution. People referring to themselves as “deer advocates” repeatedly call for contraception, which, despite the extravagant claims of the Humane Society of the United States, doesn't work. They call for trap-and-transfer, despite the facts that deer don't live through it and that no other community wants more deer. They call for the release of cougars and wolves in places like eastern Connecticut. Demanding “humane treatment,” they prevent local governments from inviting in hunters or even hiring sharpshooters. Then, when deer appear on living room rugs, bleeding and thrashing amid shattered picture-window glass, when their skin hangs on their ribs like canvas on Conestoga wagons, when they are too weak to evade the dogs that will soon sever their hamstrings and eat away their hindquarters, “deer advocates” give them diarrhea by feeding them things like cabbages and broccoli.

But the deer advocates who create the worst trouble for wildlife managers and present the only real threat to biodiversity and the future of hunting are the hunters themselves. In the more than three years since I covered the national deer crisis in the March 2002 Audubon (Incite, “Wanted: More Hunters”), the situation in Pennsylvania has gone from hopeful to hideous. Apparently that state will remain the continent's most graphic example of ecological blight wrought by backward, politically inspired management. For the 80 years prior to 1999, Pennsylvania hunters, who fund the Game Commission with their license dollars and therefore dictate policy, had demanded that the commission produce more deer than the woods could sustain. For 80 years they had gotten used to gross deer overabundance so that their sport more closely resembled a baited dove shoot than true deer hunting. If they imagined or perceived the slightest diminution in deer numbers, they shrieked like crated shoats.

As early as 1917 commission director Joseph Kalbfus gazed out over the state's devastated forests and accurately predicted that “someone is going to have hell to pay.” In 1950 commission deer biologist Roger Latham publicly scolded deer hunters for their greed and stupidity, and inquired if deer should be managed by “well-trained wildlife men or . . . the whims, fancies, and selfish desires of the deer hunters themselves.” The commission answered Latham's question when it gave in to hunters and fired him.

Then, six years ago, with a healthy shove from Audubon Pennsylvania and its partners, the commission suddenly acquired a spine. It turned the deer program over to Gary Alt, its veteran bear biologist, instructing him to reduce the deer herd until it was no longer a threat to itself and native ecosystems. “Suicide,” he'd called the job when it was offered to him; then he inspected deer damage. “It just drove me to my knees,” he declares. “I couldn't believe it. I'm not talking about little pockets but thousands and thousands of square miles that have been devastated.” In study plots in a hemlock-beech forest in western Pennsylvania, deer had reduced plant species from 41 in 1928 to 21. “Natural gardens,” providing sanctuary for wildflowers—many imperiled—were seen only in areas inaccessible to deer, such as on the tops of boulders.

In Warren, Pennsylvania, a 10-year study by the U.S. Forest Service determined that at more than 20 deer per square mile, there is complete loss of cerulean warblers (on the Audubon WatchList as a species of global concern), yellow-billed cuckoos, indigo buntings, eastern wood pewees, and least flycatchers. At 64 deer per square mile, eastern phoebes and even robins disappear. In heavily settled parts of Pennsylvania, where hunting pressure is light or nonexistent, it's not unusual to have more than 75 deer per square mile. At one Game Commission meeting, after a state botanist had testified that even mountain laurel was being wiped out, a hunter stood up and yelled: “We don't want the goddamned mountain laurel. We want deer.”

But there isn't a choice; in the long run it's both or neither. Jim Grace, Pennsylvania's state forester, tells me this: “We're confronted with a situation where, in order to regenerate a forest following a disturbance, man-caused or natural, we have to put up a deer fence and maintain it for 3 to 10 years. We're spending about $3 million on deer fence annually.” But that's mostly where there's been logging. There are 4.25 million acres of public forestland that is unfenced and 12 million acres of private land that is essentially unfenced. “We're losing all the major tree species,” Grace continued, “and virtually all the herbaceous plants. We've got an understory dominated by bracken fern, hay-scented fern, striped maple, beech brush—all commercially worthless and useless to wildlife.”