Is Killing Deer The Solution?
The Fairfield County Municipal Deer Alliance, a pro-hunting lobbying group, has been aggressively campaigning in Fairfield County over the last two years to kill more deer as a strategy for combating a variety of ills including Lyme Disease, deer/auto collisions, and landscape damage caused by foraging deer.

The Deer Alliance has sought to include representatives from all Fairfield County municipalities in a bid to lend an “official” air to its efforts, although Newtown’s representative withdrew from membership. Most recently, the Deer Alliance advocated a bill in the Connecticut legislature that would have extended deer hunting season into Sundays.

We asked Merritt Clifton, the Editor of ANIMAL PEOPLE, who lived in the Newtown, CT area in the early 90’s and did wildlife surveys in the area, to comment upon remarks made by the Fairfield County Municipal Deer Alliance.

Merritt Clifton:
First, there is no logical reason to believe that the Newtown deer population will continue to rise. Every habitat has a carrying capacity. The northern Fairfield County carrying capacity was probably reached long ago. It is now regulated chiefly by cars and coyotes, and that will continue to be the case, no matter how many deer anyone shoots.

Shooting deer in the limited public lands will merely chase more of the herd into private property. The Fairfield County Municipal Deer Alliance ignored the initial cause of high deer population, the most important issue of all, because until this is recognized and dealt with, hunting as presently practiced will only keep creating an overabundance of deer.

The science of the matter is simple: the size of the deer herd is controlled by the percentage of females in the overwintering population. The higher the bucks-to-does ratio, the lower the reproductive rate.

Deer without hunting have a 1-to-1 gender ratio, a three-year average lifespan, and females bear an average of three fawns successfully in their lives (usually conceiving twins but bearing only one fetus to maturity if food is scarce during winter.) These ratios cause the deer population to remain stable.
Humans increase the deer population by skewing the gender ratio toward does. This is done by annually issuing more permits to hunt bucks than does, so that the number of does relative to bucks in the overwintering herd steadily increases. In addition, thinning the herd each fall makes more food available to the survivors, so the does are more likely to bear twins.

This approach is called “The more you shoot, the more you get,” and was frequently written about in hunting magazines during the 60s and 70s when US state wildlife agencies were eager to rebuild deer herds, which had become depleted throughout most of their range.

Once a herd consists mostly of does, it is possible to kill does in equal or greater number than bucks, and still have rapid population growth. For example, if you have four does to one buck, you potentially have eight deer added to the population each year. If four of them are bucks and four are does, you can shoot the same number of each gender without changing the 4/1 ratio. Or, you can shoot five does and four bucks, and move to a 3/1 ratio, which will still cause the deer population to increase, even if you shoot a number equivalent to the entire overwintering population. For example, you could shoot five deer, but six would be born.

Though hunting does not lastingly decrease deer numbers, the science of the matter continues to elude those who clamor for fewer deer.

Other points to consider:

• Deer/car collisions increase not only in rut but especially during hunting season.  The peak comes when rut and hunting season coincide.  Hunted deer are typically hit by cars at night,  when they try to return to home territory from which they fled during the day to avoid beeing shot.  Incidentally,  the deer who is hit is usually a nearly grown yearling who is still followingher mother.  The driver typically sees the first deer,  then steps on the gas when the first deer moves,  not realizing there will be another nearby.
• Deer are a factor in the transmission of Lyme disease over longer distances,  but the main carriers are (and always have been) meadow voles,  a.k.a. field mice. You could totally exterminate deer and still have an undiminished amount of Lyme infection because deer are simply not the carriers most implicated in transmitting the disease to humans.  The fact that the
  infectious ticks are called "deer ticks" merely reflects that scientists discovered them on deer sooner than on mice because they looked for them sooner on deer;  it does not reflect their primary host.
• Deer are not overpopulating anywhere in the U.S.,  in the sense of being at risk of overeating their habitat and starving; they are simply too abundant for human convenience.  In terms of carrying capacity,  they have ample food.  There haven't been significant regional deer starvations anywhere since the winter of
  1977-1978 (though some isolated herds have starved here and there in deep snow from time to time),  and even in 1977-1978 the major problem was an unusually deep snowpack in southern Vermont and upstate New York. Urban and suburban deer herds have never starved,  except in some really bizarre circumstances such as occurred in a park in the Cleveland area last winter,  where snow plows unknowingly trapped a
  small herd behind mountains of snow on all sides.
  

Merritt Clifton is the Editor of ANIMAL PEOPLE, the leading independent newspaper providing original investigative coverage of animal protection worldwide. For more information, go to www.animalpeoplenews.org