Wanted: More Hunters

No species in North America has been more grotesquely mismanaged than deer. The mismanagement--ongoing--began with a crusade by the early settlers against cougars and wolves, the main predators of deer. This behavior flabbergasted the Indians. After much arguing and theorizing, they decided it was a symptom of insanity.

By the early 20th century the Feds were leading the charge against predators, and they weren't content with just control--they wanted extinction. Whipping the public to a froth of anti-wolf, anti-cougar fervor was a young Forest Service bureaucrat who, in 1919, praised New Mexico for "leading the West in the campaign for eradication of predatory animals" and who urged states to "finish the eradication work." But later, when the bureaucrat, Aldo Leopold, extended his reading to what deer were writing on the land, he filed this report: "I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise. In the end the starved bones of the hoped for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers."

That's what I saw in the early 1980s on the Crane Estate, 30 miles north of Boston, where roughly 400 white-tailed deer--340 more than carrying capacity--had denuded 2,000 acres. There wasn't a scrap of green to the height of a saddle horn. One of the last undeveloped barrier-beach complexes in the East had been shorn of native plants. Dunes were blowing away. The property, owned by the Trustees of Reservations, was supposed to be a wildlife refuge, yet the deer had eliminated wildlife that rear young and/or find cover in midlevel vegetation. Each winter most of the fawns died because they couldn't reach the browse line. In their weakened condition adults were being eaten from the outside in by dogs and from the inside out by parasites. Their skin stretched across their ribs like cloth on Conestoga wagons. Commenting on the disaster, The Boston Globe reported a "conversation" between Bambi and his skunk friend. "'Why are you sitting?' Flower asked. 'Fawns don't sit.'

"'I'm too weak to stand,' said Bambi. 'I think I'll just sit here for a few days until I fall over and die.' And he did."

The trustees had forbidden hunting here since they started acquiring land in 1945, but apart from cultural bias, there had been no reason for the ban. By the late 1970s the trustees realized that hunting was the only way to preserve wildlife, and they scheduled a public hunt for 1983, thereby energizing a national animal-rights outfit called Friends of Animals. The animal-rights movement doesn't like people who "manipulate" nature, but it doesn't like nature either. Asked what he'd do if granted absolute power over the world, a father of the movement, Cleveland Amory, declared: "All animals will not only not be shot, they will be protected--not only from people but as much as possible from each other. Prey will be separated from predator, and there will be no overpopulation, because all will be controlled by sterilization or implant."

In September 1984, after Boston magazine had asked me to write about the Crane controversy, I queried Friends of Animals about the humaneness of starvation as a management strategy. I was told that it's painless because Mahatma Gandhi, while fasting, claimed to have been comfortable enough. With that, Friends presented me with a pamphlet entitled "10 Easy Steps to Ban All Hunting!" in which I was instructed to, for example, deploy cow dung as a weapon against hunters. People who anoint themselves with skunk musk to hide their scent, then pull steaming entrails out of deer were supposed to flee from meadow muffins. That was an "easy" step.

Mobilized by Friends, the public festooned the Crane property with squashes, cabbages, beans, and beet greens, succeeding only in giving a few deer gastroenteritis (deer diarrhea). Two days before the hunt Friends flounced around with placards that read, "Save a Deer, Bag a Hunter," and group members vowed to throw themselves between the deer and the guns. The trustees canceled the hunt, then embraced Friends as one of their official advisers on deer management. At this point the area had the highest incidence of Lyme disease on the planet: Two-thirds of the people whose properties bordered the reservation were infected.

If Cleveland Amory sprang from the grave and took over the world, he could not control wild ungulates. Even if it were possible to trap and transfer deer without killing them, no one would take them. Nor is there workable birth control. While it's possible to sterilize lots of deer, it's not possible to sterilize enough to control even a small, isolated population. There is much flap in animal-rights publications about immunocontraception, an innovative method by which does are vaccinated against their own eggs. It works well on captives. But after studying nonlethal control of deer for 10 years, Larry Katz, head of the Department of Animal Science at Rutgers University's Cook College, called immunocontraception "impractical, counterproductive, and absolutely unworkable."

Has the public learned anything from the Crane fiasco and thousands of replays in urban and suburban parks and reservations across America? Maybe, but not much. Facing severe damage by an exploding deer herd, Town & Country, Missouri (its real name), surveyed 4,000 households in October 1998. Among the questions: "The city hired a consultant, Dr. Anthony DeNicola, who . . . recommended control. . . . Would you endorse lethal methods?" Fifty-five percent said no.

How about animal-rights groups? Have they learned anything? I put the question to DeNicola. "No," he said. "They never change." When deer start busting ecosystems in places where public hunting wouldn't be safe, DeNicola is the one you call. He runs White Buffalo Inc., a nonprofit wildlife management and research organization dedicated to conserving native species through population control. After he figures carrying capacity, much of his work is done with suppressed .223 rifles. He and his crew shoot deer in the head, killing them instantly. The venison is donated to the needy.