Anti-Hunters Kill with Misplaced Kindness

A deer tries to cross a road near Washington, D.C.
If you oppose hunting, you guarantee a rise in deer-vehicle impacts.



In a piece written for Audubon magazine, entitled "Public Menace," Ted Williams writes:

"There’s only one way to protect yourself, your family, and native ecosystems from the most dangerous and destructive wild animal in North America, an animal responsible for maiming and killing hundreds of humans each year, an animal that wipes out whole forests along with most of their fauna. You have to kill it with guns.

I’m talking about the white-tailed deer. In what Gary Alt, one of the nation’s most respected wildlife biologists, calls “the greatest mistake ever made in wildlife management,” deer are being allowed to overpopulate to the point of destroying the ecosystems they’re part of and depend on. The annual mortality of roughly 1.5 million deer via collisions on the nation’s highways doesn’t make a dent, save in motor vehicles and their operators-damage that costs the insurance industry about $1.1 billion a year.

There are major or minor deer problems in all 50 states-if not with whitetails then with blacktails, mule deer, elk, and such aliens as axis deer. In virtually every case the reason is that natural predators have been eliminated or reduced to the point where they can’t effect control.

The situation is especially grim in the East. No state is worse than Pennsylvania, but vast tracts in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia have been stripped of low vegetation. There are so many deer in South Carolina that bag limits are set by the day rather than by the season. On most of the coastal plain you can kill as many bucks as you want-every day for 140 days, using dogs, if you so choose. (The joke is that the deer are so stunted that the dogs retrieve.) Despite this superabundance, hunters burn and plant private land to encourage even more deer. Georgia, which also allows hunting with dogs in some areas, is so overrun with deer that it has set a seasonal bag limit of 12 (only two of which may have antlers) during two and a half months of rifle hunting. And yet, in order to manipulate national forestland to make room for even more deer, the state’s Department of Natural Resources opposes federal wilderness designation

>> To read more

Not every deer makes it ... and neither does ever driver. In the state of Virginia, there are about 37,000 reported deer-vehicle strikes a year, and across the U.S. about 100 people a year die as a consequence of collisions with deer.