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(Continued from page 5) Sport Hunting -- More Deer for the Gun in the Palisades Committee to Abolish Sport Hunting PO Box 284 Tomkins Cove NY 10986 by Luke A. Dommer, founder The familiar ruse of "Population Control" through the introduction of "Sport Hunting" is once again foisted upon us by wildlife managers in the pay of hunters. This is as it was at Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge in 1974. The result: A herd increase of from 450 head to 750 - 800 head in 1981. Why? Because sport hunting maximizes fawn production and thus recreational opportunities for hunters are increased. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) proposals will accomplish the same results in the Palisades at the expense of wildlife, the ecology and the rights of the non-hunting public. I call your attention to pages 23-24 in the DEC proposal. "The taking of bucks only is considered not to have any permanent effect on herd size." I also refer you to DEC Biologist Glenn Cole's statement at Bear Mountain: "The female kill will only comprise 50% of the numbers of males killed." These are the keys which expose the DEC plan as a hoax. Why? Because they are well aware that the annual killing of more males than females will swell the proportion of breeding females to steadily increase fawn production and provide more targets for hunters each succeeding year. The (Olean) Times Herald hunting edition, dated September 30, 1978, contained this statement by Terry Moore, DEC Regional Wildlife Manager: "We will attempt to increase the number of deer until we experience high incidences of deer-car collisions, depredation of agricultural crops becomes intolerable and/or the effects on deer habitat begin to result in deterioration." "Why?" "To increase the success rate of big game hunters." Shocked? Read on. "In order to provide hunters with recreational opportunities, the philosophy of deer management is to maintain them at optimum levels", better known to wildlife biologists as the "Maximum Sustained Yield" principle or "MSY". It works this way -- natural predators are managed (i.e. killed off) in order to allow more ungulates, such as deer, to survive while habitat manipulation increases their food supply and prompts the females' maximum reproduction potential. For example, the white-tailed doe will bear two fawns annually under good browse conditions as opposed to one under a browse shortage and will fail to ovulate if population levels are beyond the carrying capacity of a given range (innate population control), State fish and game agencies manipulate habitat by burning, clear-cutting and planting. In Michigan, for instance, 1.2 million acres of state forests were clear-cut to increase the browse for deer. The January 27, 1975 issue of the Detroit Free Press reported: "The Wildlife Division says it is necessary because a forest managed by nature cannot support a fraction of the deer needed to provide for a half million hunters." The plan was to build the herd from 400,000 to one million by 1980. Normally, for every hundred fawns born, 52 are males and 48 are females, or about a one-to-one ratio, which wildlife managers alter through "legal hunting" toward a desired sex ratio of five-to-ten females for each male in order to drastically increase the number of births. The September-October 1976 issue of The Conservationist (DEC Magazine) put it this way: "ideally, if the desired number of antlered and antlerless deer are taken (killed) each year, the population will comprise the highest number of breeding females and the lowest number of males. As a result, a maximum fawn crop will be produced each year." (The killing of bucks for trophies increases the birth rate.) In Vermont, as in many other states, this trophy buck policy has created a surplus of deer. In 1976, the deer population in Vermont was 200,000 head. Of these, 40,000 starved to death, about 8,000 were taken by hunters and another 2,000 died as a result of deer-car collisions and attacks by wild dogs. You can see then that hunting does not prevent starvation. In fact, hunting increases the amount of starvation because of management policies to provide an abundance of trophy animals for hunters. W. Evans, PhD, Assistant Director of the State of New Mexico Department of Fish and Game, in a letter to Brandon Reines dated June 20, 1978, stated: "The concepts of surplus and carrying capacity as are traditionally taught have little validity when applied to wildlife populations. From a scientific standpoint, they are impossible to define with precision and consequently, are unscientific. Unfortunately, the whole problem originates with the basic idea that habitats support wildlife and they can support only a certain number of animals, i.e. carrying capacity." Dr Evans, in a letter to Dr. Reines of July 26, 1978 stated: "Hunting has never been a necessary adjunct to population control, and it is highly dangerous to assume that hunting animals can act as a 'substitute' for any mortality factor. It produces its own set of population characteristics distinct from any other type of mortality factor. Those that claim hunting is a necessary "management tool" for population control are actually referring to its theoretical role in managing a population to achieve a specific goal (i.e. hunting). No one will ever be so rash to claim that if there's no hunting, the population will grow to infinity or sink to extinction. In fact, hunting maximizes fawn production . . . more animals are produced for the gun." On a national level state agencies have created a large population of 15 million deer. Here are the results in Pennsylvania, which has a population of 700,000 MSY deer. Roger Latham, a former Outdoors editor for the Pittsburgh Press described it this way: "An ecological disaster and nothing short of a catastrophe." He continued, " 8 million acres of mountain forests have become barren and uninviting to most wildlife including the deer which have severely depleted the ground cover (shrubs bushes, wild flowers, etc.). Because of this, soil erosion has undermined the quality of the mountain streams while many species of trees are being killed in their younger stages of growth and natural forest reproduction is failing to occur on hundreds of thousands of acres in the main deer ranges. "Rabbits, song birds, grouse and other species are vanishing because they can barely be supported on this land, and birds of prey have become a rare sight. The black bear is exposed to over-hunting because it has nowhere to hide from hunters. As if that's not bad enough, a staggering 3 million acres of farm land have been abandoned because of crop damage, and insurance companies are paying out $150 million in claims annually because of the yearly toll of 25,000 to 29,000 collisions with deer in which some motorists have lost their lives." This is in the state of Pennsylvania alone. This is a heavy price to pay to "provide hunters with recreational opportunities". The 15-point buck of the Berkshires paid a heavy price also. He was so heavily hunted that he is no longer in evidence. Somehow his gene pool became exhausted and he ceased to reproduce himself. It has been argued that: "Starvation, disease, predation, and destroyed habitat result when hunting is not used as a management tool." This claim, which constitutes a basic justification for recreational hunting, is premised on the theory that "hunters take only surplus animals, thus helping to keep wildlife in balance with available food and shelter." In fact, it is an established biological principle "that most natural populations of terrestrial vertebrates, including some game species, are regulated by a complex interaction of environmental variables which maintain population size within certain limits." These include food, space, territories, predators, parasites, disease, interspecies competition, and hunting. Generally, variations in one population factor will be offset by adjustments in other factors so as to maintain a population within certain limits. Writing in the January 1974 issue of Smithsonian , former hunter Jack E. Hope noted: "That even in the unusual case of white-tailed deer, which now exist in far greater numbers than in the 19th century, the concept of the hunters' harvest as a conservation measure has only contrived short-term validity. Approximately 13.8% of the total white-tailed deer population is taken annually (not including crippling losses) by hunters. This hunting pressure has created a biological imbalance since it does not permit the herd to fluctuate with changes in habitat, but maintains it at an unnaturally high level." Without hunting, the population balance would be genetically healthier than the one maintained by recreational hunting since a natural thinning of the herd would be more selective in eliminating the aged and infirm animals. With the reduction in deer numbers, habitat changes would also occur as a result of reduced deer browsing and other wildlife species could then increase their populations to occupy a portion of the habitat now used by deer. + + + Back to start of this series: WHY THERE ARE TOO MANY DEER Marion Stark of Fund for Animals submission to NYS DEC The effect of deer management on Lyme disease Link to subsequent news after January 2000 V v v V |