Hunting helps both Hunters and Hunted

If you were asked what is the most dangerous wild animal in the US what would be your reply ? The Alaskan Grizzly Bear ? The Mountain Lion ? Florida Gators ? Rocky Mountain spotted Tick ? Turns out it is the noble and Disney-esque Whitetail Deer. Yes, Bambi kills hundreds of Americans each year. Deer/Vehicle collisions kill ten times more people each year than sharks, bears, cougars and gators combined. In fact Deer /Vehicle collisions kill more people than all commercial plane, bus and train collisions too.
Whitetail deer have become one of the most successful game species in history. Their populations skyrocketed when they were transplanted from Minnesota and Wisconsin to every other deer starved community coast to coast. The natural check on deer populations are predators that don’t exist in most urban areas. The deer population is estimated by game managers to greatly exceed the numbers that were here in 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Currently, they number somewhere around 30 million animals.
Enter the hero of our little story, the Deer Hunter. Deer hunters annually provide hundreds of millions of dollars for wildlife management programs. Their hunting license fees, deer tag fees, taxes and fees on guns and ammo are a primary funding source for Game Managers, and wildlife biologists. Hunters are licensed by the State Fish and Wildlife Department to harvest only the excess population of deer.
Hunting helps in other ways too. Deer are grazers, similar to cattle and when deer populations exceed the carrying capacity of their range, food sources end up over grazed and can trigger a host of environmental bad hair days. Hunters keep herds within the ranges capacity and in well managed areas you will see a bloom in plant diversity and less erosion. You’ll also see more songbirds and small game animals as they have needed cover, and you won’t see a browse line where everything is eaten up to the 5 foot level. Deer hunting is “incentive based environmentalism” meaning hunters pay to hunt and the net effect benefits the entire ecosystem, not just the deer herds.
Where hunting isn’t allowed these areas cannot control their game populations. Consider the Rocky Mountain National Parks un-hunted herd of Elk. It was so over populated it was destroying its habitat. The Park services first pass at a solution was to hire night shooters with silenced rifles to thin out the herd by taking 700 elk per year. The cost was a staggering $860,000. They decided to allow hunters to buy Elk tags and the Elk herd were thinned to the proper level, and the Park Service had a surplus from the program.
The New Jersey Audubon Society discovered that the whitetail deer population in their wildlife refuges had over browsed the songbirds nesting cover. Song bird populations plummeted. For the first time in their 100 year history the Audubon Society called on the State to bring in hunters to reduce the deer population.
The tale of two-faced cities revolves around Princeton, New Jersey. This University town is on the surface an anti-hunting, politically correct township that has a huge deer population problem. What did they do? They trapped and sterilized hundreds of Bucks, at a cost of close to $600 per animal. They tried deer birth control, darting the Does with a drug called PZP –porcine zona pellucida as a sterilization agent. The cost was $800 per animal and after spending close to a million dollars, with no success, they decided to bring in night hunters with silenced rifles. The hunting program worked and was done at a cost less than $50 per animal. To give you an idea of the scope of the problem, Princeton could effectively support about 400 deer, but had 1600 animals. The odd twist was the same people that constantly called in to complain about the deer eating their gardens were also the same people opposed to actually solving the problem with hunters.
Then the fireworks started. A group of 150 protestors stormed the City Council meetings chanting slogans, waving handwritten signs…you know the drill. The Mayor offered to stop the program if the protestors would fund the alternative program themselves, and the crowd slowly dissipated. Two years later the deer herd is healthy, and the townspeople stopped whining too.
The next time you see a fellow in camouflage clothing, carrying a rifle in the hills, try to remember that he is one card carrying member of the stewards of wildlife. Hunters are Conservationists and want to preserve wilderness for both human enjoyment as well as safeguard these wild places as sanctuaries for all wildlife.