Please put this on our site. Can you put the title somewhere boldly, up front and center so it will serve as a teaser to entice people to READ MORE
Everyone needs to read this including us. People need to understand that these urban deer kills are merely a huge polical machine and has nothing to do with science, conservation or legitimate biology.
Realities of hunting as a population control: Why there are so many deer today
Politics & Wildlife (see below): ??
Although counterintuitive, the truth is hunting isn't much of a population control tool. There are a number of reasons why this is the case, the most significant being the fact that once a portion of a wildlife herd is removed, the remaining animals have more food to eat. This rather straightforward reality has some subtle implications.
Dr. Allen Rutberg, head of Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine and renowned expert on nonlethal means of deer population management, states that:
ReplyDelete"The most visible weakness in the assertion that hunting is necessary to control deer populations is that it has LARGELY FAILED TO DO SO over the last two decades. Just because deer are being killed doesn’t mean that deer populations are being controlled."
Despite the countless deer kills that have taken place in parks and neighborhoods, the cry still goes up, "There are too many deer!" "We've got to do something about the deer!" Yet government wildlife managers (ODNR) have understood for a century or more that killing a significant portion of a deer population helps ensure more deer will be present for hunting in the future. Rather than solve problems, deer kills have become a big problem. Deer kills have made de facto gamelands of neighborhoods where discharging weapons is illegal and parks were designed to be safe for wildlife. No matter what the method, a vote for a deer kill is based on excuses rather than responsible action and against sound environmental stewardship.
"As we have seen, state wildlife biologists, have been nurtured on the hunting philosophy and been taught that ecosystems can be improved by manipulation. Unfortunately, the more man tampers with Nature, the more he must rely upon "management" activities to maintain a semblance of ecological balance; and these activities are harmful to established ecosystems. Hunting, whether in the presence of large predators, is no guarunteed annual 'check' on deer populations." Dr.Allen Rutberg
"Archery has never been a valid control measure for animal populations. It's a recreational offshoot of gun hunting, and as such, they can't really sell it as a control measure...so what is often done - and this is done wrongly -- is that people will come in and they will often use what I call the 'D' words - devastation, destruction and disaster--- to talk about these particular animals. And, what they do is steer the public into thinking these animals need to be killed. And many times these people will say, we understand archery is not going to control the deer herd, but gosh, we gotta do something, these things are big rascals, we gotta kill some of 'em, just stick a few of 'em, anything."
Dr.Thomas Eveland Ph.D Wildlife Biologist
"We often think predators control prey, but that is rarely the case." Prey controls predators; predators diminish as prey declines. It is not the case that removing wolves, cougers, and other predators causes deer to increase."
Michael A. Coffey, Wildlife Biologist, Natural Resources Management Division
Gary Alt, former Chief Deer Biologist in PA said, "Deer management has been the biggest mistake in the history of wildlife management." He refers to it as 'MALPRACTICE'