Death in Venison
Norman, Geoffrey
441111 in Ulir" There's a Bambi crisis in Rmerica. White-tail deer are more numerous than ever before—so abundant, in fact, that thetlue become a suburban nuisance and a health hazard. Why...
...n some suburbs around New York, Washington, and other eastern cities, the deer are so numerous they have become not just pests but an outright danger to humans...
...Kill them all, if you can...
...Treatment with antibiotics works but not always...
...Which is just about what it sounds like...
...And there is no question that deer are vastly more numerous than they were twenty, thirty, fifty, or a hundred years ago...
...Deer do not do so well in mature forests...
...They show themselves in loud national arguments over everything from abortion to movies to school choice to...
...the other considers deer a resource...
...All the working men are out in the woods...
...So if an animal breeds so prolifically that it is a traffic and health hazard as well as an economic and aesthetic nuisance, what do you do...
...Furthermore, death by starvation is what necessarily happens to some deer, every winter, in Vermont...
...Today, Alabama is thick with deer...
...They might stay in camps with a bunch of their buddies, or belong to clubs that have been in existence for several generations...
...I'll show you the trails they use...
...The local papers still run pictures of hunters standing next to a hanging buck...
...She cites the example of a community outside of Rochester that found itself infested with deer...
...34 February 1997 ?The American Spectator...
...These are generally men-only clubs, and some are dedicated to tall talk and heavy drinking more than serious hunting...
...It does not take a few hungry deer very long to devastate a lovingly tended garden or a yard that has been carefully and expensively landscaped...
...For one thing, it concentrates the deer in places where they are vulnerable to what has become their most lethal predator—now that the wolves and mountain lions are gone—the domestic dog...
...Hunting took off in Westchester and when it did, according to Kelly Stang of the DEC, "nuisance deer complaints dropped to the lowest level in twelve years...
...The answer would seem obvious...
...Typically, they will put out hay which, according to biologists, can contain microbes that will explode a deer's stomach...
...In America, there is just no escaping the deep cultural antagonisms between traditionalists and the new elites...
...Why can't the herd be thinned the old-fashioned way...
...The hunting season lasts several months, and there are so many special seasons — archery seasons and muzzle-loading seasons, for instance —that it is hard to know exactly how many deer a hunter can legally kill...
...And this situation has led to some interesting developments...
...People who have spent weeks putting in a garden often find that they are sharing it with the deer who come in at night...
...Hunters traditionally want to kill bucks...
...It causes fatigue and other, more severe symptoms, and can be especially debilitating, even fatal, to people who are very old, very young, or otherwise in poor health...
...rifle hunting would be unsafe in that kind of crowded environment) would be given a permit to take another deer from the county...
...It ranges across most of the United States but is concentrated most heavily east of the Mississippi...
...Vermont, of course, is within easy driving range of Boston and New York, and every year more people come to the state with the money and the attitudes they have accumulated in and around those places...
...In Vermont, where I now live, the deer season is treated with something close to reverence...
...Even my doctor takes opening day off and goes hunting...
...The disease is a bona fide health hazard...
...No," says Stang, "if enough people are against hunting, even when the deer are clearly out of control, you just can't get it done...
...When they see deer struggling through the winter snow covering their yards, they take pity, and they feed them...
...There were almost 5oo cases reported in Maryland last year, the number growing along with the size of the deer herd...
...And easy...
...The deer that die are, generally speaking, the older bucks who are past their prime and the weak fawns...
...There are all sorts of special community events, such as pancake breakfasts and game suppers to raise money for charity, built around the deer season...
...the other in killing just as many as necessary...
...One wonders why not...
...You can kill as many as you want...
...They were utter pests?rats with hooves," he called them—who made it impossible to garden or keep up the grounds...
...The die-off keeps the herd strong...
...The season was short...
...In places like Pennsylvania and Michigan opening day is very close to a state holiday...
...Killing the does, however, will...
...partly for reasons of status —bucks are bigger, more wary, and they have those antlers—and partly for reasons having to do with conservation...
...The man was no hunter...
...Men who have dreamed of not much else for the last year go out into the woods wearing their hunter orange (which, by law, has replaced the traditional red and black) and carrying their Winchesters, Rugers, and Remingtons...
...Those deer become food for other species...
...A lot more than a hundred, but who's counting...
...Can't you just open a hunting season...
...They have a way of darting out of the shadows into the path of a car at night, giving the driver no chance to stop or swerve...
...Still, that community is doing something...
...So there is talk of contraceptive programs where does are shot with darts that are sometimes occasionally, The deer opulation has exploded of so much in spite of man but cause of him and his works—the ps he planted, the predators he killed,the golf courses he built...
...In New Jersey, for instance, the regulations encourage the killing not of Bambi, who was a young buck, but of his mother...
...Lately, the town has begun to allow some hunting again...
...well, even what to do about the common white-tail deer...
...In the minds of these new Vermonters, however, it is the individual deer that is important...
...I'll put you up...
...Last fall, when a friend who owns property in one of the New Jersey suburbs of New York learned that I like to hunt deer with a bow and arrow, he invited me down...
...Feed is put out to lure the deer to a spot where off-duty policemen and other officially sanctioned shooters are paid to kill them...
...Not enough hunters had taken advantage of it, and those who had were not killing enough deer...
...A licensed hunter in New York may kill one deer, but the Depai knent of Environmental Conservation (DEC) created a system under which a hunter who had killed a deer in Westchester (with a bow and arrow...
...n Westchester County, celebrated rural bedroom community of New York City, the deer population was out of control and the landowners were complaining...
...Lyme disease, specifically, which is carried by a tick that lives on the deer and will bite humans...
...This solution recalls Lord Macaulay's famous line about how "the Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators...
...Even if the feed put out by these compassionate people is okay (and they have been known to offer deer a peanut-butter sandwich), the simple act of feeding them is not...
...Now, he hated deer...
...One tends to The American Spectator ?February 1997 anthropomorphize the deer...
...I killed that deer in an Alabama swamp very much like the big, epic woods where Ike McCaslin came of age in William Faulkner's The Bear, and I can still remember feeling some of the same mute and faintly melancholy awe that Ike experienced...
...Deer are more abundant in Westchester County than in the Adirondacks, the vast park with its thousands of acres of wilderness...
...I can remember getting my face smeared, when I was 12 years old, with the blood of the first deer I ever killed...
...Please come...
...the wary, graceful Bambi living nobly in the deep, primeval woods until man the killer and corrupter arrives and, naturally, shoots his mom...
...The Bambi myth has much, if not all, of it wrong...
...The few deer left in the state lived back in the river bottoms, mostly, and they were hard to hunt...
...But in communities where there is no legal hunting and there are too many deer, it isn't so easy...
...Memberships are highly coveted...
...And, if that second deer was a doe, he could take out a third permit...
...In Montgomery County, outside Washington, D.C., there were 782 automobile accidents involving deer in 1992...
...Most people, especially hunters, consider it good news since the wildlife departments establish longer hunting seasons and larger bag limits and will even do things to encourage the killing of females...
...One side believes in protecting every single deer...
...The first year he owned the property, he said, he loved sitting in his living room, looking out the picture window, and seeing a deer, moving across the ground with that wonderful blend of poise and nervousness, stopping now and then to nibble at the tips of some shrub's branches...
...By 1995, the number was up to 1,711...
...It was one of the big days of my life...
...Hunters and people who work with deer, on the other hand, think in terms of populations...
...T he deer is probably the archetypical American game animal, and the deer hunt is a kind of cultural ritual in many parts of the country...
...You open a hunting season...
...tented suburbanite...
...by Geoffrey Norman he white-tail is, generally speaking, what most people have in mind when they think of deer...
...In those days, if a hunter killed a deer he could almost count on getting his picture in the local paper...
...There had been legal hunting in Westchester for years, however...
...His wife would practically rage whenever she saw one...
...And as newcomers to the state quickly find out, during deer season you cannot get a plumber to come fix a leaking faucet or a mechanic to work on your transmission...
...The deer population has exploded not so much in spite of man but because of him and his works—the crops he planted, the predators he exterminated, the logging he did, and the lawns and golf courses he built...
...People are concerned but unwilling to bloody their hands...
...Far from being a creature of the deep, primitive woods, the white-tail is a conGEOFFREY NORMAN is editor-at-large for Forbes FYI...
...The special permit system changed that...
...Drivers injured and, killed...
...So many people were opposed to hunting that the community was forced to come up with an alternative solution: something called "bait and shoot...
...The killing of deer is better and cleaner, presumably, if it is done by a bureaucrat...
...But in the absence of hunting, with each doe typically bearing twins, and sometimes triplets, in the fall of the year, it does not take long for the deer population to explode...
...But now, the disease has become so widespread that doctorsknow to look for it right away...
...Especially when the animal in question is a game species prized by hunters...
...I can remember hunting deer in Alabama in the fifties with little hope of success...
...Practically begged me...
...They are opposed to hunting and they post their land...
...Killing a prudent number of bucks will not diminish the size of the herd...
...The disease is spread by this bite...
...In other suburban communities, there has been a lot of talk but very little action...
...The 32 February 1997 • The American Spectator 0 typical greeting between men is a laconic, "Get yours yet...
...Bucks will mate with as many does as they can, so if you kill one buck, another will move into his territory and impregnate the does there...
...Deer are largely nocturnal creatures and they act unpredictably around automobiles...
...But if suburban deer are a traffic hazard and a blight on the lawns, gardens, and golf courses of some of the country's more affluent communities, their status as a nuisance animal is made most secure by the fact that they spread disease...
...The limit was one antlered buck per hunter...
...Along some highways in New York and Pennsylvania, where the road crews have planted grasses the deer like to eat, the carcasses are everywhere, swarmed over by crows getting fat on the carrion...
...It was difficult to diagnose when it first began showing up, particularly in the Connecticut suburbs, a few years ago...
...In fact, unlike some species that truly are creatures of the wild and cannot exist in close proximity to man —the grizzly bear, for instance —the deer actually does better close to civilization...
...They are very versatile eaters, with a special fondness for garden vegetables and ornamental plantings...
...Where there is a strong, rural hunting tradition, the widespread increase in the number of deer is no problem...
...Suburban deer are more than traffic hazards...
...The deer, in the minds of many people, is an embodiment of wild, unsullied nature...
...Princeton, New Jersey, passed a "no firearms discharge" ordinance back in the seventies and saw a 600 percent increase in the number of collisions between deer and vehicles...
...Wildlife biologists estimate that there are considerably more whitetail in North America now than there were when the first Europeans arrived...
...Last winter, they ate $15,000 worth of landscaping...
...33 The deer are usually killed in the resulting collisions and the cars are damaged...
Vol. 30 • February 1997 • No. 2
