
What the Deer Are Telling Us - Ygg2
http://nautil.us/issue/23/dominoes/what-the-deer-are-telling-us-rd
======
Spooky23
I grew up in rural upstate NY and can attest to this. Once subdivisions reach
further out into the countryside, the denziens of these developments (another
disease afflicting the land, IMO) apply their city-thinking to the environment
around them.

In my town, farmers were harassed out of business by McMansion owners who
built houses abutting farms, but were offended by the odor that come with pigs
and cattle. Hunters parking on the side of county roads were pushed out by do-
gooders complaining about the parking situation (in an area where 5 acres is
the minimum building lot!) resulting in a rash of "parking on pavement"
tickets. Then came the banishment of rifles for deer hunting, because "think
of the children".

The end result... the culture changed. The first day of deer season used to be
literally a school holiday. Now, it's a fringe thing, and my parents routinely
see herds of 100+ deer at night -- when you drive up their road at night, it's
spooky... you see dozens of eyes reflecting in the headlights! When I was a
kid in the early 90s, I never saw more than a dozen at a time.

~~~
kbenson
Forcing farmers out because new residents weren't smart enough in scouting
their new home location is stupid.

That said, I'm not sure I can muster any indignation that hunters can't hunt
as much, or that the first day of hunting season is not "literally a school
holiday" anymore.

~~~
chrisbennet
I used to belong to a local Fish and Game club that had skeet shooting fields.
(Skeet are fun to shoot but the meat is very tough.) The club was forced to
close the shooting ranges due to neighbors that moved into the area around the
club because they didn't like the noise. The club had been shooting there for
80 years before that...

~~~
kbenson
My apathy stems from the act of hunting a live animal. While I understand
hunting for food for _survival_ , hunting for sport or hunting for food when
it's not essential doesn't sit well with me.

As for an overpopulated animal, I imagine there _must_ be a better way to deal
with that than allowing people to shoot them. Don't get me wrong, I'm not some
bleeding heart when it comes to animals, they aren't all perfect snowflakes of
uniqueness, I don't don't see the _reason_ to cause an animal that can feel
pain to feel that pain without a good cause. To me, "we've been doing it for
generations" is not a good cause.

Edit: I'm still interested in having this discussion, but preferably along one
of the established threads sprouting from this, unless the point of view
hasn't been covered in a reply. There's as little point in me replying the
same thing multiple times as there is in having multiple replies to this
stating the same thing, but that doesn't mean there aren't interesting things
to be said on this topic.

~~~
stouset
Your plausible options are rifles, predators, and poisons.

I'm all for reintroducing more predators, but suburban sprawlers tend to get
upset when their pets get eaten regularly.

~~~
saalweachter
One of the DEC guys I talked to was a big proponent of more fences. When you
put up deer fences around fields, you don't just protect the crops inside, you
also restrict the deer's movement and access to food.

Of course, at the end of the day you're still ultimately in a "the deer
population stabilizes at the point that deer start starving to death"
situation, but you can at least lower the deer population to minimize both
their impact on the environment and the number of adverse deer-car
interactions.

------
ChuckMcM
This has been a boon to the mountain lion population in California :-)
Although I was a bit dismayed when the news covered the attack of a deer by a
mountain lion[1] as though it was a "bad" thing. I've pointed out before that
if you don't let people hunt these animals other predators will fill the gap.
wolves, coyotes, lions, and the occasional bear have all been active in
California.

[1] [http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/San-Mateo-Residents-
Wit...](http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/San-Mateo-Residents-Witness-
Mountain-Lion-Attack-Deer-265467731.html)

~~~
pyre
The problem is when those predators have been completely removed. It requires
manual intervention to bring them back. Can you imagine the protests to
bringing back predators to an area? "Think of the Children!"

~~~
logfromblammo
My hypothesis is that humans can fill any predator niche, all the way down to
insectivores.

When the natural predators are completely removed, humans are certainly
capable of filling the gap. We have, after all, billionhandedly hunted some
species to extinction. If the rifles are too dangerous for the area, live
capture traps and knives would work just as well.

The only reason people use long arms instead of more efficient traps to kill
game animals is because operating a trap line is boring in comparison. It's
the same reason why people catch fish using a rod and reel rather than a giant
net or a fish wheel. It's just more fun.

The real question here is "why are these people surrounded by food and not
eating any of it?"

~~~
pyre
> It's the same reason why people catch fish using a rod and reel rather than
> a giant net or a fish wheel. It's just more fun.

Well, you also have the consider the affect of every person that goes fishing
on a small waterway using a giant net and catching many times the number of
fish... That seems like a good way to destroy the local fish populations in
addition to destroying the underwater environment by dragging nets through it
constantly.

------
vdnkh
Interesting article. My first job was working in a park in Monmouth County,
NJ. Of the two parks I worked at, one was completely fenced off from deer
while the other had small sections fenced off to study the impact of deer on
forest regeneration [0]. The caged park had a number of rare plants and if
deer got in (which happened pretty frequently), we would drop everything and
corral them out of the park. The second park was much too large to cage, but
the park system allowed hunters to hunt during certain times of the year.

[0][http://co.monmouth.nj.us/documents/127/deer_annual_report_20...](http://co.monmouth.nj.us/documents/127/deer_annual_report_2013_2014.pdf)

------
datashovel
This is the part that stood out to me, though not entirely unexpected.

    
    
      Earth, as biologist E.O. Wilson has noted, is in the midst
      of a sixth mass extinction. (There are five others in the geologic
      record, stretching back 500 million years.) “Extinction is now proceeding
      thousands of times faster than the production of new species,”...

~~~
happyscrappy
This part stuck out for me.

"Again and again, time has proven the Malthusian pessimists wrong."

~~~
datashovel
I get the impression you read that passage as a "feeling" or a "belief". I
read it as the person quoted was citing scientific fact that, regardless
whether the outcome for humans is negative or positive, is an observable
phenomenon in the physical world.

I have no stake personally in whether it will turn out good or bad for humans,
though of course I wish no ill upon future generations. However, the fact is I
will be long gone before anyone will know what the impact will be.

~~~
happyscrappy
How in the world would you get the impression that it was a feeling? You are
projecting your and the medias doom mantra. Malthusian pessimists were wrong,
sorry.

~~~
datashovel
"doom" and "pessimism" are human constructs. In the objective physical world
things "are" or "are not". The quote says that objectively verifiable facts
indicate the earth is experiencing a mass extinction.

There is no such thing as "doom" or "pessimism" besides that in which humans
perceive it.

~~~
EC1
>There is no such thing as "doom" or "pessimism" besides that in which humans
perceive it.

Yes, and we are humans, who discuss things in a human context. You can discard
anything with "it's just a human construct". Where are you trying to go with
that?

~~~
datashovel
That's a fair question. Ok, so let's take the following statement:

    
    
      true && true === true
    

I would posit there's no meaningful, or reasonable way you can attach some
human emotion to the above statement. And it is true whether or not humans
exist.

Similar with events that occur on earth. If humans weren't around to
experience a mass extinction there would be nothing "pessimistic" or
"doomsday" about it. It would simply be an event that occurred in the history
of planet earth.

Now let's consider scientific studies. Imagine the following statement:

    
    
      We have done a large scale study on the number of
      species on earth.  We identified X total species in 2003
      and we identified X-1000 total species in 2004.  Every
      year since this date we have identified fewer and fewer
      total number of species in this study.
    

There is nothing inherently "pessimistic" or "doomsday" about the above
statement. It is simply a statement of a scientific study. When someone reads
it, however, perhaps they infer or speculate on what this means to the human
race and attach some emotion or feeling about the above statement, whereas the
statement itself is completely void of these emotions or feelings.

So I would say that it's not the case that you can "discard anything" in this
same manner. In fact I think it's an important thing to point out because
that's an enormous, unfortunate, and critical misunderstanding of popular
culture about what science is and what scientists do.

~~~
EC1
Never thought about it that way, thanks.

------
brlewis
Deer need predators. Humans need higher income and education:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence)

------
zzalpha
Sounds like we need to do our job as apex predators. 'course, that won't make
some animal rights folks happy, but until the natural predator population
rebounds (which it may never do), it's our responsibility to at least clean up
our own mess and do the job for them.

~~~
protonfish
It's the wolves that are the apex predators, not us. Natural hunters prey and
the very young and old, the sick and weak. Human trophy hunters target almost
exclusively mature males. Not only does this do nothing to thin the herd of
its weakest members, it does little to make a significant reduction of
population. There is no reason to think that if half of the male population
were culled, any fewer does would be pregnant the following year.

~~~
nonameface
Not all hunters are trophy hunters, that is just a subset of hunters. Numbers
from my state show close to a 50/50 split between antlered/anterless (Note:
Anterless may contain some bucks, but the hunter thought they were shooting a
doe)

[http://wvmetronews.com/2015/01/16/final-numbers-
on-2014-deer...](http://wvmetronews.com/2015/01/16/final-numbers-on-2014-deer-
seasons/) The breakdown on each season: Firearm Buck season 37,766 bucks,
antlerless firearms hunting, 39,514 antlerless deer, archery season, 21,653
deer and 5,290 deer during muzzleloader season.

~~~
ky3
But are the anterless hunters doing it because they want to? Or because they
are forced to by law?

Meaning, all hunters are actually trophy hunters, just that for every trophy
they bag, they must haul out -- at their own expense -- non-trophies.

------
gbog
Why don't they eat them? Deer meat is excellent, much better than this
industrial red and humid plastic sold as beef in the U.S.

In France I heard boars are too many, and destroy the crops. Let's make a new
trend in haute cuisine: boar meat as the new flavor. It can't be worse than
molecular cuisine. Also, it's is much better from animal rights point of view:
boar life is better than those of industrial pork generating machines (aka
pigs).

~~~
ky3
_Why don 't they eat them?_

The USA has a tradition of being a land of plenty and so people eat what they
have always eaten before. For almost all of America that means chicken or
beef, invariably. And turkey during that time of the year.

They have no tradition of organ meat, meaning liver, tripe, hoofs, etc.

The conservatism in tastes mean a lot of work cut out for anyone trying to
sell new food in what is still a highly industrialized landscape and high
barriers-to-entry sales channels.

E.g. if you're poor you eat deer until you grow up traumatized by it:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9351269](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9351269)

------
sogen
Wow, didn't know that there's a deer ultraoverpopulation.

Very interesting reading, thanks a lot!

~~~
eitally
If you live in the eastern US (I guess anywhere but within major metro
centers) it becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly, but likely more for long
time residents than others. My brother in law is a veterinarian and he got a
"deer population control" hunting license last year that allowed him to take
up to 40 deer. Our collective freezers are chock full of venison. Luckily,
someone had a brilliant idea to create a meat donation charity (Hunters for
the Hungry), which has distributed millions of pounds of venison to the needy
over the past couple decades. Here's an information clearinghouse for anyone
interested: [http://huntingprograms.nra.org/hunters-for-the-hungry-
inform...](http://huntingprograms.nra.org/hunters-for-the-hungry-information-
clearinghouse.aspx))

~~~
jmccree
There's a pretty interesting article about the efforts in GA to manage the
deer population:
[https://www.gon.com/article.php?id=2518](https://www.gon.com/article.php?id=2518)
. Hunting is still pretty popular in the southeast, so there's a constant
balance between destroying the deer population and the deer population
destroying the environment.

~~~
ghaff
I know of tech companies in the southeast that have team events in which
they'll go out hunting for the day. I imagine that's less common in Silicon
Valley :-)

------
cmurf
"Ecosystem damage becomes apparent at roughly 15 deer per square mile..."

And yet

[http://dnr.wi.gov/topic/hunt/documents/abungoals.pdf](http://dnr.wi.gov/topic/hunt/documents/abungoals.pdf)
The numbers in red are well higher than 15. So if that's right, it seems like
Wisconsin (for example) would need to reduce its deer population by at least
50%. That's quite the culling.

------
cmurf
If we were smarter, we'd go back to more native grasses and eating the animals
that eat those grasses if we can't eat those grasses ourselves. What we do
instead is the exact opposite. We destroy the native grasses, bring in non-
native plants to grow non-native animals and then eat those animals. Sometimes
I think I'm an alien, and scoff at how proud humans are of their ignorance and
hubris. But hey, good luck with that.

------
cmurf
Meanwhile in Colorado, just a couple years ago, officials were freaking out
about the mule deer population dropping. And they're all, we have to bring
back our deer! I wonder if a combination of drought and previous overgrazing
is the source of that drop.

------
blakeja
Pretty good documentary "The Private Life of Deer" that speaks towards deer
overpopulation a bit:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9t0sYnIGBo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9t0sYnIGBo)

Should be on Netflix as well.

