The recent article, “It’s that Deer Time of Year,” offers tips to help drivers avoid hitting deer, but tells an incomplete story. While mating season initiates deer movement, hunting practices, too, are to blame. The Erie Insurance Group cites a five-fold increase in deer-related accidents on opening day—a statistic that has nothing to do with rut.
Unfortunately, the article also presents a platform for the Quality Deer Management Association, but offers no dissenting perspective. Despite the benign moniker, QDMA is dedicated to producing trophy-quality bucks through selective hunting and habitat manipulation. Like the DEC, QDMA seeks to normalize the recreational killing of wildlife through carefully constructed arguments which, to an undiscerning ear, sound like science.
The DEC’s recent Deer Management Study finds that “hunters prefer to harvest older bucks.” In other words, they pursue the biggest rack, despite the fact that killing bucks does not determine population. Dr. Allen Rutberg, a proponent of the newly EPA-approved deer contraceptive PZP, observes, “The most visible weakness in the assertion that hunting is necessary to control deer populations is that it has largely failed to do so… Just because deer are being killed doesn’t mean that deer populations are being controlled.”
Sadly, the DEC has done nothing to dispel the myth that deer numbers affect the incidence of Lyme disease in humans, while experts, including those from the Harvard School of Public Health, explicitly state otherwise. Deer neither carry nor transmit the disease, and not a single peer-reviewed study correlates deer culling with Lyme disease reduction in humans. There is, however, an abundance of data to suggest that killing deer has no impact on Lyme disease transmission.
What does impact tick population is the fox and lowly opossum. Opossums consume as many as 5,000 ticks per season, and foxes, who consume rodents, are essential to controlling the disease. But from late October until mid-February, New York hunters and trappers are permitted to kill an unlimited number of either species in any manner they see fit, including drowning, suffocating, and shooting. Coyotes, also essential to balanced ecosystems, are blamed by hunters for suppressing deer population, and endure six months of killing. Suggesting that we prevent Lyme disease by killing deer with bows and arrows in suburban backyards, or that we rectify the decline in hunting by encouraging 12-year-olds to shoot animals, is absurd.
Science doesn’t have an agenda, nor is it dependent on the sale of weapons or hunting licenses; but that is how our current system of wildlife management operates. The more we understand interdependency and ecosystem health, and the more diligently we assess the motivations of those who determine wild lives’ fate, the more evident the need for a balanced perspective.
Ashley Pankratz is a wildlife and outdoors enthusiast who lives in Livingston County.
Exposing the Big Game 
Reblogged this on The Extinction Chronicles.
Strange how the “science” of wildlife management so often accords with what hunters want.
It’s also sad that while people (rightfully!) complain about trophy hunting of iconic and beautiful animals, not much attention is paid to the fate of all the humble “trash” animals whose lives are destroyed in terrible ways. In this article it’s noted that foxes and opossums can be killed in unlimited numbers by suffocating, drowning, shooting. To that can be added squirrels, raccoons, rabbits, etc., that are killed either on purpose or as collateral damage in the attempts to poison or trap others animals (wolves, coyotes). Their lives matter too.
It’s just business as usual…combine ignorance of the benefits of different species ( I did not know that possums “hoovered” up ticks) with our designation of so many species as pests that need to be managed, and human blood lust and it’s a wonder anything is left. I am more convinced than ever before that the only species that is a true pest/plague, that truly needs to be managed is us.
Amen to that!
Great article!!!! I would like someone to address the fact that deer meat is donated by Hunters Helping the Hungry to food pantries. I don’t see how they can get away with that. The meat is not U.S.D.A. inspected. Some butcher looks it over and says the meat is safe? How does anyone know how long the deer was laying out in the sun before it was brought in? How about Chronic Wasting Disease? Most food pantries are very careful not to accept expired food or dented cans! How many people are actually taking this deer meat? I wonder if the meat is being sold to zoos or pet food companies.