Apologies for the delay in getting this column posted.
“How about if wildlife managers had not created artificial unnatural populations for hunters? …What should be culled are wildlife mis-managers.” ~ Marion Ambler
Deer deserve us to be better than this.
The annual “traditional” nine-day deer kill Nov. 22-30 is a gruesome celebration of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resource’s killing business. Children and women killing our wildlife are prominently featured on the website. New in the past few years: the rise of the crossbow and the addition of the Sept. 13 – Jan. 4 period to the kill. An upbeat “enjoy the bloodlust” message from Scott Walker and his cheerleader appointee Secretary Cathy Stepp adds to the macabre “tradition.”
Wisconsin’s deer strategy is similar to New York’s, which is explained by New York big game state wildlife biologist Jeremy Hurst. “When we want to manipulate the population, we…
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Exposing the Big Game 
Hunting is not “fair chase” in any circumstance, except when the game pulls a surprise attack and changes the equation of who is hunted. Man is using scoped powerful, far reaching rifles, ATV’s, high powered binoculars and other technology to get to and find and kill the game. The targeted “game” did not ask to play the “fair chase” game and there is not an equal chance of death on both sides of the game. Hunting with rifles or arrows is inherently cruel. Archers wound rather than immediately kill about half the time leaving the animal to suffer for hours, days, weeks or months. Trappers often leave their victims in traps for 48 hours or more then brutally kill them. One side views the other as recreational opportunities, the other side views the situation as an escape from horror, death and injury, or injury, pain and death. Subsistence hunting evolved into sports hunting and killers of wildlife are called sportsmen. We are long past subsistence hunting as a defensible argument. We rather rapidly turned away from that when humans turned to agriculture and animal farming and human population exploded and continues to do so. Animal farming (AKA ranching) is also unsustainable with 7 billion people going to 10-11 billion by end of the century. Wildlife is being hit hard on multiple sides: rancher, farmer, extraction industry, development encroachments and sports killing (AKA hunting), and wildlife agencies’ killing. So, hopefully, “if it does not feel right, don’t do it” spreads to more and more of the population. Sport killing, hunting, leads to a distortion of wildlife ecology with farming of target game species and a minimization and marginalization of predators and wildlife agencies’ killing and farming for hunters. It is animal slaughter in a horrendous scale with humans killing 27 million animals daily for food, and that is not counting the sea life and hunting. Half the world’s animals have disappeared in the last 40 years.