http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/12/science/life/12DEER.html?8isc

Very interesting quotes:

quote:

---

Except in a few favorable situations, sharpshooting, trapping, birth-control darts, repellents and other tactics are not having a big impact, he and other experts say.

Expanded hunting, considered by many experts to be the best hope of controlling numbers, has its limits as well. For example, most hunters, and most states' hunting regulations, still favor shooting bucks, even though the best way to control populations is to kill females.

Some states are changing regulations in ways that could cut deer numbers, but hunters are resisting. Others are expanding seasons and the number of deer a hunter can kill, but federal wildlife officials note that hunters are a graying population, with fewer each year to make a dent. In any case, controlled hunts staged in suburbs often run up against strident opposition from animal welfare groups.

---

quote:

---

Changing Hunters' Habits

In most places around the country, many wildlife experts say, the biggest effect on deer populations will probably come through changing hunting practices.

The Sand County Foundation, a Wisconsin land conservation group, has a decade-old program allowing hunters to kill deer on preserve and private lands, as long as they shoot a doe or two before taking a buck.

"The whitetail deer is a lovely, engaging animal, and it thrills me to see them, even now when they're causing so much trouble," said Dr. Brent M. Haglund, the president of the foundation. But now that numbers are so excessive, balance must be restored, Dr. Haglund said, and the only realistic way to do that is for hunters to replace the country's long-vanished predators.

The cost of doing nothing has risen too far, he said. "Deer collisions are killing people," he said. "That to me is the most legitimate reason to look for sound, sustainable ways to reduce deer density."

In Pennsylvania, where exploding deer populations have erased tree seedlings and trillium and other wildflowers from many forests, game officials have begun reshaping hunting regulations, less to suit the desires of hunters for ever-bigger herds and more to suit the needs of ailing ecosystems.

The main changes are designed to encourage the shooting of does instead of bucks. This initially rankled many hunters.

Dr. Alt, on the Pennsylvania Game Commission, said he used to think his biggest on-the-job hazard was crawling into a den to study hibernating bears. But when he joined the commission three years ago, he said, he was heckled and hounded at crammed public meetings where angry hunters attacked his ecological approach to deer.

Attitudes have started to change, he said. Expanded seasons for antlerless deer, most of them female, are becoming popular and are expected gradually to reverse the proportions of killed male and female deer. Eventually that should stabilize the herds.

But the slow spread of chronic wasting disease, a brain infection of deer and elk similar to mad cow disease, may impede efforts to use hunters to manage deer.

In Wisconsin, where the disease most recently appeared, applications for hunting licenses have dropped 25 percent to 30 percent this year, said Peter J. Gerl, the executive director of Whitetails Unlimited, a national private hunting group based there.

Officials say there is no evidence that the disease can cross to humans. But some have advised people to avoid meat from deer taken in areas where the disease has been found and to use caution in butchering their animals, avoiding contact with brain or other tissues that could hold the viruslike protein particles that cause the illness.

This fall, hunters have been helping Wisconsin officials kill 25,000 or more deer in the zone where about 3 percent of a sample of deer tested positive for the infection. But in the long run, the outbreak could discourage hunting in the state, harming the economy and increasing deer numbers.

---

The NY Times article is an extensive one and reasonably well-balanced.

In some instances, it is the fault of hunters (and the regulators of hunters) who have a "trophies only" mindset, that the deer herd is out-of-balance with females and mature bucks are scarce. In most places, every hunter ought to take at least one doe before ever taking a buck.

In other instances, the deer herd is burgeoning inside the protection of suburban city limits or extra-territorial jurisdictions where the discharge of firearms is prohibited. There's not much hunters can do about this, but selective removal of females from inhabited areas by controlled shooting is far preferable to the less-humane method of "netting and whacking". Contraception is totally ineffectual; no one who is seriously trying to manage deer regards it otherwise.

There are a few pieces of habitat that are under-populated where trapped deer could be transported, but as a population control strategy, trapping and removal are prohibitively expensive; and besides, the deer population will immediatly rebound as soon as trapping ceases.

While I'm a great enthusiast of shooting sports, the unrestricted use of firearms for hunting in populated areas by the kind of Bozos we know are out there in the general citizenry would have tragic results. These city managers have a tough problem.

My suggestion: Open up areas to sport hunting inside city limits which are at a reasonably safe distance from houses, then encourage that hunting. In the enclaves between houses where sport hunting is unsafe, use paid sharpshooters on a regular basis.