Is Man-Made Deer Overpopulation the Right Issue to Take a Stand for Animal Rights?

If you were to design a system for ensuring an overpopulation of deer, it would look a lot like DC's Rock Creek Park - a huge expanse of temperate land with well-maintained vegetation, no predators, and no hunting allowed.

And it's worked perfectly! So now the National Park Service is having to pay hunters to harvest the deer for food:

Sixty to 70 deer are expected to be shot. After the carcasses are tested for disease, the venison will be donated to food pantries.

The Park Service says that what it euphemistically calls a deer “harvest” is needed to safeguard the health of the park, the herd, and the people who live nearby or use the park. With 70 deer per square acre, the park has about four times the density considered ideal.

Animal rights activists have called for the Park Service to use birth control, but that's proved expensive and ineffective. Meanwhile, the results of the man-made deer explosion have proved disastrous, with car-deer accidents and Lyme disease among the serious public health threats. When animal rights activists are comparing the deer cull to Newtown and using the hashtag #DontKillBambi, are they being dismissive of those threats to people?

The case for culling is even greater if you see Rock Creek Park for what it is - a man-made deer farm. Why not take advantage of it, especially considering how much deer meat food pantries stand to gain? I'd seen reports online that one deer can feed up to 200 people, which seemed high but is backed up by the math. One pound of deer meat makes up to six servings. The average deer provides 40 to 60 pounds of meat. By that math, assuming every culled deer is healthy, we're talking about meat for 10,000 meals provided free to food pantries.

Climate Change Fueling Tick Invasion in Western Massachusetts

Catching up on some posts that got lost in the shuttle before the election. Got this email from friend in western Massachusetts in late October:

I was bow hunting yesterday afternoon for the first time this year. At the end of the hunt, I picked 14 deer ticks off of me. I have never seen this kind of infestation as bad as this. It makes you not want to wonder out into the woods. In the 31 years that I have been hunting this area, I don't think I've pulled 14 ticks off me total. Very discouraging.

Deer ticks are one of the nasty creatures that are thriving thanks to climate change. Massachusetts officials expanded the allowed take for deer hunters on Martha's Vineyard & Nantucket this year due to extremely high deer populations.

People freak out at sightings of black bears, which very rarely attack people. But we let 30 million tick-carrying, car-smashing deer wander around without a worry, because Bambi.

A Problem We Should Gobble Up

At the same time turkey prices at the grocery store are going up, there are more wild turkeys than ever.

Considering we have both an economic crisis that's leaving millions of people unemployed, millions more families in need of food assistance and a dangerous overpopulation of delicious game species, one would think we could kill three birds with one stone.

The Disastrous Results of Unlimited Deer

A hundred years ago, humans hunting for food had nearly wiped out local populations of deer, turkey and even squirrels in the Mid-Atlantic region. And humans protecting their livestock or hunting for trophies wiped out bear and wolf populations.

Deer were eventually reintroduced - and their populations exploded. While black bears have made a comeback, they're too slow to hunt adult deer. Wolves are great deer hunters, but reintroduction efforts in the eastern half of the United States have had limited success. And deer hunting is restricted on private property & on federal parkland, where deer thrive dashing through backyards and parks.

Today WAMU reports on the disastrous results for both people & our environment:

As an ever-rising population of white-tailed deer have bumped up against their human neighbors in the D.C. area, the results haven't been pretty. There were an estimated 88,000 deer-vehicle collisions in Virginia, Maryland, D.C., and Delaware last year.

But beyond the roads, experts say the deer are also having a major impact on forests, which are unable to replenish themselves to nurture the next generation due to the deer population's eating habits.

Nationwide, those deer collisions result in 140 deaths and $3.8 billion in property damage every year. And it's not as if overpopulation is great for the deer, which can face starvation and disease.

This isn't a problem only in rural areas - Rock Creek Park is being stripped of plants below shoulder height. Even if deer populations came into balance today, it could take generations for trees to recover.

But the good news is that proper population management can deliver results right away. In Yellowstone National Park, a combination of hunting and wolf reintroduction have helped drive a rebirth - not just for trees, but for the birds, beaver, and dozens of other species that depend on a balanced ecosystem.

The bottom line is that unlimited, unchecked deer population growth isn't good for anyone - not for deer, not for humans, and not for our ecosystems.

Update: My friend Max points out, "And how about deer ticks? Since I work in Reston, I walk through approximately eleven billion deer ticks every day between the bus and the front door of my office."

Update #2: WAMU has corrected its number for vehicle-deer collisions & this post has been updated to reflect that.

Could Trees Disappear from Northern Virginia?

Earl Hodnett, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, thinks it's possible. The danger? Wildly overpopulated deer, with no natural predators in the DC suburbs.

From a recent interview with Washingtonian:

These overpopulations bring significant, probably irreversible damage to the environment. The deer have removed ground-dwelling plants from this area. Even if we got rid of all the deer today, the deer have kept those plants from emerging for so many years now that the seed bank has lived out its shelf life.

All the animals that depend upon that strata of the forest for food, for cover—all that’s gone. There’s a growing list of forest-dwelling birds whose numbers are on the decline. It’s not just that we have an animal with charisma that everybody likes because of its big brown eyes. It’s a big problem.

There aren’t future generations of the forest. If it’s an acorn trying to sprout, the deer eats the whole thing. When the trees we have die, it’ll all be soccer fields.

We've made a choice that deer are so cute, we don't mind that they're vastly overpopulated to the point of throwing the entire food chain out of whack. Even though they're wiping out our next generation of native plants and trees, even though they carry ticks & Lyme disease, even though they've made Virginia the seventh-most-dangerous state for car-deer collisions. We're not doing the deer, the environment, or ourselves any favors.