We advocate on all animal protection and exploitation issues, including experimentation, factory farming, rodeos, breeders and traveling animal acts.
FROM
Ashley Pankratz,
DemocratAndChronicle.com
October 25, 2017
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.
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