12/01/03
Why not haul unwanted deer from Roanoke to the mountains?
Because it's a stupid idea
By Bill Cochran
Roanoke.com
In the minds of some well-meaning people, the easy solution for dealing with an overpopulation of deer in urban areas is to capture the unwanted animals and haul them to the national forest or some other remote location.
This naive recommendation has been promoted in letters to the editor of The Roanoke Times following Roanoke's efforts to cull its deer herd through use of sharpshooters.
"Why not use darts and drugs to put the deer to sleep and move them up into the mountains? I think it's because the police and game personnel are too sorry to do the work," wrote Joe Cameron of Wytheville.
"Is this [sharpshooters] the best solution we can come up with, or just the easiest?" wrote Susan Friedman of Roanoke. "How about capturing and relocating them?"
My question: Relocating them where?
Maybe to some farm valley in Bedford or Botetourt County, or Floyd or Franklin County, where deer already are gnawing crops to the nub.
Or maybe to the George Washington and Jefferson National Forest, where deer habitat is declining because of no-cut practices, and where hunting pressure is on the skids and the quality of deer too often is poor because of marginal habitat.
Or how about releasing a truckload of deer along the Interstate where the blacktop already is red with the blood of animals that have tangled with tandems.
In short, there aren't any places in Virginia that need more deer. There hasn't been for years.
Even if there were, relocating deer is a tricky and expensive practice at best. The animals are difficult to trap. The trauma factor is huge. Mortality is high. The threat of introducing diseases and parasites is real.
The use of a gun or bow is a preferred solution to trapping and trucking deer. In fact, it is the only solution, although that reality is lost on some people.
"Do we really want to show our children that the way to deal with a problem is through violence?" asks Friedman.
In my opinion, here's what we want to show our children: That the kindest, most gentle, most humane thing that we can do for deer, or other wildlife, is to keep these animals in balance with their habitat and within the cultural carrying capacities that confront them. When we fail to do this, we degrade a beautiful, graceful animal, to a tick-carrying, crop-gnawing, disease-harboring, vehicle-bashing invader that Outside Magazine dubbed as "rats with hooves."
Thirteen localities in Virginia wisely have opted to be part of the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries' expanded urban archery season this year. A citizen's wildlife task force recommended that Roanoke City use this approach as a primary deer herd control method, but city officials decided to employ retired police officers bearing night vision goggles, infrared sensor equipment and a noise-suppressed Remington "Whisper 300" rifle. The use of sharpshooters was a secondary culling method recommended by the task force.
One member of the task force, Joe Schupp, a hunter safety instructor, has continued to press for an urban archery season, telling city officials that they adopted only half of the recommendations of the task force.
"One program without the other will not solve the deer problem," he said.
Knowledgeable city officials realize this and say additional control methods may have to be implemented. This could include urban archery or the hired guns of some professional animal control outfit. Just this week, city officials announced that they would ask General Assembly representatives to amend state law to allow the baiting of deer in an effort to cull the animals.
One advantage of an urban archery season, it makes skilled citizens part of the solution at no expense to the locality. Bowhunters are afforded recreation and meat; the locality gains assistance with its deer problem at no cost. Heck, bowhunters would even pay for the privilege to hunt.
"But we can't have every drunk Tom, Dick and Harry chasing deer across our backyards, killing our dogs and endangering our children," is a statement I've heard way too often.
The urban archery season lets localities hand-select participants. The inept, unqualified and undesirable are eliminated. Schupp has drafted a list of 11 regulations that could be adopted by the city to manage the season.
The work of Schupp and other key members of the task force largely has been overlooked and unappreciated. City officials need to realize that citizens supporting a viable solution to the deer problem are the best friends that they have. They also are the best friends that the deer have.
