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Deer Management

I       General history, beginnings and need to modernize (p. 1)
II      History of Deer in America, and history of wildlife management and deer
        management in America (p. 6)
III     Deer overpopulation, the Pennsylvania case (p. 10)
IV     Cruelty of hunting deer (p. 16)
V      Deer and automobiles accidents (p. 18)

I. General history, beginnings and need to modernize

Introduction, overview and viewpoint

Deer are overpopulated in many areas of the United States and hunters often say they are performing a service when they kill deer for recreational hunting. However deer are mismanaged by the state wildlife agencies because of hunters and the hunting mentality influencing the decisions on how to manage the deer numbers. And this has been the problem ever since deer became an overpopulated species in the mid 1900s. Hunters know little to nothing about deer overpopulation or how deer affect the forests. So the problem with deer overpopulation is a really a problem with hunters.

The story of deer in America has been one of a sharp decline in their numbers, followed by overpopulation. The European invasion from the 1600s through to the 1800s, brought with it market hunters and other hunters who killed just for the sake of killing. They killed deer, as well as elk and buffalo to near extinction levels. Many states had so few deer left, that they were almost completely gone. At this point, state governments started to reintroduce deer in alliance with hunters, and raised money for this by the selling of licenses to hunters. So the beginnings of wildlife management and wildlife refuges were organized by government and hunters, with the hunter’s interest being the focus. Funding was obtained by selling licenses to the hunters. The relationship of wildlife agencies and hunters that started in this manner in the 1900s, continues to this day, along with hunters being the ones who dictate to the wildlife agencies what they want from the agencies, namely lots of game animals, including deer.

Hunters from the early 1900s were accustomed to abnormally high populations of deer and thus great ease in being able to find them and kill them. This overpopulation of deer was an abnormality then and it is today. When deer are at their normal population levels, which in a natural system is dictated by the quantity and quality of food that the deer need, it does take a good degree of diligent stalking and getting deep into the woods to find one and then be able to kill it, even with a rifle. However hunters want this to overpopulation to continue. They want to be able to go into the woods for one day, and travel less than 1 mile deep into the woods, and be able to see and kill deer as a leisure activity. This creates gigantic problems, including:

- pain and death to deer through starvation
- destruction of forests because of overbrowsing
- underdeveloped deer because of insufficient food
- large numbers of deer crossing roads and causing automobile accidents
- large numbers of deer dead on the roads and having to be picked up and brought to landfills.

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This is a great tragedy and grave cruelty to the deer to be subjected to this kind of treatment. And it should be remedied by putting deer management squarely in the hands of knowledgeable people who understand and care about the deer and ecological management of the land in general and who understand that the natural way is for deer to be in the forests in low numbers compared to the high numbers that are present today in states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

From a deer’s perspective, it wants to live its natural life in the fields and forests, without being stalked by hunters or killed by automobiles when traveling in their daily activities. From the human perspective, deer populations should be kept within limits where they do not put undo pressure on ecological systems of forests by overbrowsing, and also are not an interference on roads, where they can cause automobile accidents. However it is only humans who are capable of regulating these processes. Humans are the shapers of the landscape. However they can be caring and enlightened about their management. Of course human populations also need to be kept at a safe level in accordance with ecological laws.

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The current system of management of wildlife by state Fish and Wildlife agencies

Currently deer populations are managed by the Fish and Wildlife divisions of each state. The Fish and Wildlife departments were started by state governments in order to have some control over the wild animals and lands, at a time when there was a sweeping, all out assault on the wild animals in the United States by hunters. Many animal were being hunted to extinction, and so government decided it needed to regulate the hunting in order to preserve the animal species. The state Fish and Wildlife departments were set up with funding obtained from licences sold to hunters. The hunters and the hunting mentality created the F&W departments and that is the way they continue to be run today, like a perpetual motion machine that has never been re-examined or rebuilt. And it is high time for this to occur.

The Fish and Wildlife Department funding should come from the general public and more specifically from people who have a special interest in the well-being of the wild animals, lands, and waters, namely the conservationists, wildlife lovers, and people who have a special concern for wildlife and the wild land. The wild animals and the lands need to be managed by knowledgeable people, and also people who care about them for their own sakes, and not in order to make money from them, in an exploitive manner. This should be from a biocentric approach, where humans have a guiding hand in the management of wild animals and wild lands, but where the welfare of all concerned is involved, and not just the interest of humans.

The department of Fish and Wildlife can be used for people to better understand and appreciate wild animals. They could be used as an educational center about these subjects. There are many interests that humans have for the wild animals that are good for humans and do not at all hurt the animals, such as the art of tracking, learning about the ecology and behavior of wild animals, learning about the spiritual side of wild animals as it is taught in many native religions, and using creative skills of art and drawing to appreciate the wild animals and share their beauty with others. Also webcams are a great way to participate in the lives of the wild animals, without interfering with them. Right now there are already many webcams setup in wild places to watch animals, and more of these could be put in place and they could be further developed and expanded for the opportunities they offer to appreciate wildlife from a vantage point that is not intrusive on them.

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II. History of Deer in America, and history of wildlife management and deer management in America

Origins of Deer

Deer entered North and South America 2 million years ago. They originated in Asia, as a very small type of deer, that was suited to tropical temperature and habitat, specialized in obtaining food in this habitat and a good competitor for food. The deer that inhabit North America are different in that they are large and they are opportunists, as opposed to specialists. They are poor competitors for food and only did well in America’s landscape after the megafaunal extinctions of the ice age, when the woolly mammoth, the sabre tooth tiger and other large predators died at the hands of humans. They need a large variety of browse in their diet, unlike horses and buffalo that can live on the fibrous material of grass. They also need forest areas for protection. They need to have young forests with lots of new growth to obtain their food, and cannot survive in mature forests where they are unable to reach the leaves and branches of the trees. They also are not suited to deep snows and will hole up in one area when there is a large snowfall, and eat food that is in the near vicinity. They will starve if there is not enough food locally for them to eat over a winter.

Deer of the World, Their Evolution, Behavior and Ecology, Valerius Geist, 1998

Beginnings of Game Management and Conservation in America

Aldo Leopold was a pioneering ecologist most active in the 1930s. He started out in forestry and was a professor of game management in Wisconsin. He wrote an entire book on Game Management in America. In the first chapter, he describes the general development of game management in human history, being something that was supposed to give men advantage in their own survival if they took care in their use of wild animals, to not over-hunt them. The European use of game management was basically that of making laws ensuring only the ruling class was allowed to hunt. Regarding conservation, Leopold says that European game management for centuries had only one simple objective – to improve hunting for the private landholder. In America, the objective was to perpetuate game animals, to extend their existence as it was thought that they would eventually disappear. American game management started as a way to control hunting by the general public, by having closed seasons and requiring the purchase of a license to hunt. All states had game laws by 1880. The first national park closed to hunting was Yellowstone National Park in 1894. The market hunter who killed deer and sold them was criticized as being too destructive to wild life and their perpetuation, and this practice was made illegal.

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Later Theodore Roosevelt put in place the practice of conservation through wise use, so that wildlife, forests and waterways could be a renewable resource. Birds came under the legal control of federal government because they were migratory. Forest animals came under the legal control of state governments. Aldo Leopold himself points out that science was busy learning how to catalogue types of species, but had not yet learned about the behavior and ecology of these species, many of them becoming extinct just as they were being catalogued by the scientist. Conservation was a new concept. He also states that the path of game management is a crooked one, with many pioneers creating the path and that there is no end to the path. He says his own notions about game management will surely be outdated as those who came before him were outdated. (Aldo Leopold, Game Management) . The exploitative use of animals is outdated and should be replaced by an enlightened biocentric approach which cares about the animals for their own sakes, and humans are part of the system of nature, not apart from it.

History of deer pre and post European invasion Beginnings of deer management

Market hunting and wildlife extermination

In the early days in America before the arrival of the European, deer were plentiful, except near to regions that were permanently occupied by the native peoples. The Europeans that came to America began an all out assault on wildlife. By the 1700s, many species such as the deer and elk were either completely gone from many regions of the Eastern United States. And by the 1850s, European market hunters, and hunters who just killed deer, buffalo, elk and other wild animals in large numbers just because they could, brought these animal populations to near extinction across the United States.

In the book, Deer of North America, 1956, there is an essay titled “The Deer, The Indians and the American Pioneers” by Stanley Young a biologist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, with the following description of market hunting effects on the deer.

“By some authorities it is estimated that some ten million mule deer and more than forty million white-tailed deer occupied their original range. The deer population during the peak of the Mound Builder or later Aztec civilization can only be guessed. Whatever it was, deer numbers hit a low between the years of 1875 and 1915. In 1908, Seton estimated the entire population at 500,000. The causes of this startling decline are plain from such accounts as the following by John Mortimer Murphy (1879): “I heard of a man who killed a hundred (mule deer) in one stand in a mountain pass in Colorado.” “Dr. Carver killed 230 wapiti, 80 deer, and several buffaloes in two weeks.” A stock raiser in Idaho County, Idaho Territory, is said to have killed 30 mule deer from Monday to Saturday. “This ruthless destruction is producing the most disastrous results, for where mule deer were so plentiful in 1868 that they could be seen by the hundred in a march of twenty-four hours, scarcely a dozen could be seen in the same region in 1877.

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As an example of deer killed and sold by market hunters, there is the following from this essay:

A good many deer hides were shipped overseas. According to a table compiled by William Brown, Comptroller and Searcher of His Majesty’s custom, in Savannah, Georgia, some 2,601,152 pounds of deerskins, from about 600,000 deer were shipped from Savannah to England between 1755 and 1773.

Institution of closed seasons to protect deer

Because of intense market hunting of the deer, the states began to put into place closed seasons on the deer, in order to protect them from disappearing completely.

In 1656, Rhode Island became the first colony to establish a closed season on deer. In 1698, Connecticut did likewise, being later followed by Massachusetts. These colonies were the first to realize that if they were to continue to utilize deer, the traffic in the game must be controlled.

In the early 1900s, some states such as New Jersey and Pennsylvania started to reimport deer and had strict laws in place regarding their hunting, in order to give these deer populations the opportunity to repopulate.

The history of the New Jersey deer herd through several centuries exemplifies the vicissitudes of wildlife in areas invaded by white men. The record shows that in 1679 the General Assembly prohibited the export of dressed deerskins (made into leather) taken by Indians. From that date until 1850, when the once abundant deer herd had become almost extinct, a maze of laws was enacted in the attempt to save the deer. More than half a century passed before public opinion was ready for the reintroduction of white-tailed deer with stock obtained from private parks and shooting preserves.

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The first game department, Yellowstone, Montana

The first Fish and Wildlife agency was started in Yellowstone Park in 1920 by the game warden, W.F. Scott. It was created by Montana government, and it was setup to collect fees from hunters as a way to create funding to run the game departments. So from the very outset, and continuing to the present day, this is the way the Fish and Wildlife departments are run, the partnership of government and hunters.

From “Managing American Wildlife, A History of the International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies”:

The small band of state conservation leaders that convened in Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone Park on July 20, 1902, came in response to the call of W.F. Scott of Helena, Montana. He was Montana’s first game warden, the office just having been created in 1901. In one year’s time, he had organized the state into districts headed by deputy wardens, advocated hunting and fishing licenses so that the users would support the protection and enhancement of their own sport, and sought possibilities beyond his own borders. (1st chapter)

Some of the first actions of the Wildlife agencies were:

    - Abolition of spring shooting, to protect breeding animals
    - Creating nonresident hunting licenses to protect animals from market hunters who came from outside states
    - Passing the first bag limit laws
    - Making it illegal to transport game across state lines (The Lacey Act)

These acts all changed the emphasis from commercial use of wildlife, to recreational use, with states having ownership of wildlife in their state. Migratory birds came under the jurisdiction of Federal government.

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III. Deer overpopulation, the Pennsylvania case

Deer Overpopulation – the solution has been known since 1930s

Hunters deciding how the wildlife agencies manage deer results in disaster

In many states, notably Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, deer are severely overpopulated. And they have been that way since the early 1900s. As far back as 1950, the problem of deer overpopulation in Pennsylvania was being discussed and the remedy was known back then. The answer is to keep populations of deer down to a level where they do not overbrowse the forests, where they can survive the winter without starvation. And the way to do this was primarily by killing does. However even though there were intelligent and rational men who were in charge of the Game Commission in Pennsylvania, the hunters, who themselves knew nothing about the lives of deer, or how they affected the forests, were the ones who deciding how deer would be managed. This was by the hunters pressure on the Game Commission and anyone who tried to reason with them about the need to keep deer populations low, would be fired from their jobs. That was the scenario in the 1950s and it is the exact same situation today.

Repopulating deer in Pennsylvania after the devastation of large scale killing and market hunting

From Deer Wars, Robert Frye, 2006 (p 9)

Hunters of the era, who wrote of taking as many as a hundred deer each fall, decimated the herd. (In 1869, 1876, and 1895, the deer season was shortened.) All of this was too little too late. Constant hunting pressure, combined with widespread clear-cut logging that, in the practice of the day, left entire mountain-sides without a single tree standing, had destroyed the deer population.

In 1895, hunters led the way in creating the Pennsylvania Game Commission, and the inauguration of a hunting licence to fund the Commission. (The hunters also established game reserves to allow the deer to repopulate with deer imported from other states)

All of these factors – game preserves, transplanted deer, less hunting pressure – were in play at the same time that the state’s forests were beginning to grow back. Most of the deer’s predators had been eliminated too. The result was a boom in the size of the deer herd. As soon as the forests started to grow again, the deer herd just went crazy.

Pennsylvania’s deer herd, doubled between 1913 and 1915, doubled again by 1921, again by 1924, and again by 1927. That trend continued for decades, with the size of the herd spiraling upward unabated.

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Roger Latham, Pennsylvania’s Deer Problem

An early proponent of the need to lower the population of deer in Pennsylvania, mainly by killing of does, was Roger Latham, a biologist who worked for the Pennsylvania Game Commission. In 1950, he wrote an in-depth paper on the white-tailed deer and how to manage it and an appeal to hunters to heed the advice given. He points out that hunters who are so adverse to killing does and do not agree with advice by the biologists on managing deer herds, know practically nothing about the deer themselves, how they live, mate, reproduce, or what they eat. In a paper titled “Our Deer Problem”, in the section titled Management Recommendations, he says the following:

Probably the most formidable problem which has confronted the Game Commission during the past 30 years, and one which has seriously hampered scientific management, has been the opposition of well-meaning, but uninformed deer hunters.”

Most of the dissension between the hunters and the Game Commission concerning the management of the deer herd arises because so many sportsmen lack a complete knowledge of the habits and physiological requirements of this animal. (p. 4)

The Hunters of Pennsylvania should modernize their thinking. The Buck Law was passed in 1907 because it was felt that the herd would build up faster if does were protected. This was sound reasoning and the herd did build up to numbers far beyond anyone’s expectations. But for the past 25 years, the deer of Pennsylvania have had “growing pains” and the need for, and value of, protecting female deer has long since outlived its usefulness in management. (p. 33)

Deer in Pennsylvania are extremely overpopulated. They decimate forests by overbrowing them, so they cannot properly grow back. Then there is not enough healthy forest to sustain the deer and the deer die in large numbers over the winters.

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From Roger Latham article

The food of Pennsylvania whitetails have changed greatly within the past 40 years. It is no loner a case of the deer choosing the browse they most prefer, but, instead, being forced to eat anything and everything to survive. It has been found repeatedly that where deer are abundant certain plant species may be heavily browsed, but on areas where deer are only common to scarce these same species maybe almost or entirely untouched. Also, because of over-browsing, some of the most palatable and nutritious species may have been eliminated from parts of the range, and the deer, through the effects of their own voracious appetites, have had to substitute less desireable trees and shrubs in their diet. When browse was plentiful, the tough fibrous twigs of the oaks, beech and other similar woody plants were practically untouched, but today these same trees have become important browse species in some regions. (p. 7)

Mast such as acorns and beechnuts, add to the fall and winter diet and are especially valuable as a source of protein and fat. A heavy acorn crop often permits the deer to enter the winter with a fair amount of fat stored over the rump and around the kidneys and this aids considerably in survival during the winter months. The loss of the chestnut reduced the total food-producing capacity of the forests and consequently reduced the carrying capacity of the range. (p. 9)

Farms
As the browse became badly depleted in the forests because of overbrowsing and the maturation of the timber, the deer were forced to turn to agricultural crops to survive. It is only when natural food as found in the forests is insufficient that deer are driven into the fields, but, when once educated to eat farm crops, deer may alter their normal diet to include these items if natural foods again become abundant.

Predation
Because of its size, the whitetail deer has few natural enemies in Pennsylvania. Probably stray dogs are most destructive to adult deer, and foxes may lead in the killing of fawns. So few wildcats are left in the state that it is not unlikely that their removal of small, weak, and diseased individuals may have a beneficial effect upon the prosperity of the herd. Because bears are hibernating during the season when deer could be caught and killed by these animals, their predatory activities upon deer are believed to be of little consequence.

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Deer are large animals that consume a lot of forage in order to survive. They need a wide variety of types of forage from trees, plants and seeds. They do well in new growing forests with lots of young trees. They cannot survive in mature forests, because they cannot reach the branches or leaves once the trees reach a certain height. In the summer, a forest may look like it has lots of new plant growth, but a biologist who knows what native plants should be there can tell, that it is actually a species poor forest because the deer have eaten certain plants and they won’t grow back after that. Furthermore deer eat many plants and seeds that other animals depend on such as rabbits and squirrels. So too many deer adversely affecting a forest growth will also adversely affect the numbers of other animals that can live there.

Effects of deer on forest

A recent book called “Deer Wars” by Robert Frye, 2006 discussed the problem of hunters interfering with proper deer management, and the adverse effects of too many deer on Pennsylvania forests.

Richard Gerstell, a biologist with the Game Commission in 1938, tried to educate sportsmen about the need to balance deer with their habitat in an article he wrote for the Pennsylvania Game News magazine entitled “Pennsylvania Deer Problem in 1938.” Gerstell warned of the need to balance the deer herd with the forest ecosystem. “Steps must be taken to remedy present conditions or both the deer herd and the deer range will suffer unprecedented and irreparable losses,” he wrote.

What concerned Gerstell was that deer were dying in winter because of malnutrition. Field officers for the Game Commission did a survey from December 16, 1934 to May1, 1935, in which they collected 964 deer that had died from “pathological causes” – that is, something other than old age, gunshot wounds, accidents, or the like. Of those deer, fewer than 1 percent died from poisoning. Fewer than 1 percent died from parasites. Another 7 percent died of unknown causes. The majority – 881 of the deer, more than 91 percent – died from malnutrition.

“The demand for food exceeded the available supply and all suitable and attainable food was consequently devoured without fulfilling the demand. The deer, therefore, consumed various greens, twigs and other materials in an attempt to satisfy their craving for food and in doing so filled their stomachs, but the material contained therein was so low in actual food value that although the stomach was full, the animals perished from lack of nourishment.”

Gerstell concluded that the only real solution was for hunters to shoot more does, thereby decreasing the deer population enough to let the forest repair itself.

The situation persists today, nearly four decades later. The population of Pennsylvania has grown by 3 million people since 1944. The deer herd is also larger, numbering somewhere around 1.5 million animals. (p. 22, Deer Wars)

Deer have drastically changed the makeup of Pennsylvania’s forests. instead of a diverse system – where trees sprout, mature, and produce seedlings that grow to replace them, where the understory is thick and varied, much of Pennsylvania’s forest is made up of hundred-year-old trees reaching toward the sky, lots of ferns blanketing the forest floor, and little in between. (p. 58, Deer Wars)

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The book “Deer Wars” also describes how both Roger Latham, a biologist dedicated to solving the problem of Pennsylvania deer overpopulation and overbrowsing of forests in the 1950s, and another proponent of proper deer management, Gary Alt who was head of the Game Commission for several years, leaving in 2004, were both driven out by the hunting community who did not want to follow their sage advice on how to manage deer populations.

Ultimately, though, Roger Latham was fired, his sin having been to argue for trimming Pennsylvania’s deer herd. He wanted hunters to shoot more deer overall, and to shoot more does in particular, to bring the herd into line with their available habitat, to prevent the possible outbreak of disease, to make the state’s forests a better home to a greater variety of plants and animals, and to make the deer themselves healthier, bigger, and less susceptible to starvation. (p 16)

Regarding Gary Alt who gave lectures to the Pennsylvania hunters on how to manage deer.
“Hunter expectations were developed in an era with extremely high deer densities”, Gary Alt says (former head of Pennsylvania Game Commission). “That caused a love affair with seeing lots of deer. They loved it so much they got hooked on it. That fueled their desires. The result, though, was that those desires prevented deer management, and caused billions of dollars in ecological damage. (p 240)

“When you read the history of deer management in this state, it reads like a horror novel,” former Game Commission Gary Alt says. “Every time anyone tried to change things by talking about deer in relationship to their habitat, they just got killed. They either quit, got transferred or got fired. (p. 22)

At each lecture, he would talk to hundreds of people abut the need to balance the number of deer with the available habitat. The lectures were hot. Sportsmen opposed to Alt's would show up ready to shout him down. Law enforcement officials within the Game Commission persuaded him to wear a bulletproof vest to his lectures.

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Wisconsin had a similar problem with overpopulation of deer and the wildlife agencies bending to the will of the hunters instead of listening to the experts.

A study done by the federal government under the Pittman-Robertson project on starvation of deer in Wisconsin in 1942 had the following summary. (A History of Wisconsin Deer, 1946, Ernest Swift)

    1. The Wisconsin deer herd has increased beyond its food supply, and is beginning to starve during hard winters like 1942-1943.
    2. The degree of over-population varies; not all localities are in critical condition, but critical spots are increasing.
    3. Starvation so far kills mainly fawns. Their stomachs are full of food, but not good food.
    4. The good winter food plants are being eaten out, are unable to reproduce, and are being replaced by plants of inferior value.
    5. Artificial feeding does not relieve the pressure on good food plants.
    6. The herd should be reduced to carrying capacity of the good winter foods.
    7. The sooner this is done, the more good food plants will be salvaged, and the more deer can be carried in the future.
    8. If the herd is not shot down, it will starve down. Further starvation means further depletion of food plants, and this means a very small herd for decades to come.
    9. Reducing the herd means reducing antlerless deer.

Even to the present day, with all the knowledge of the devastating impact that an overabundance of deer has on the forests, the Game Commission is still run by the hunters, and the forests are suffering, as well as the deer.

As wild animals, deer do not belong in urbanized settings or in parks within cities. There is not enough food for them to eat in these areas and they cannot navigate around cars. There should be further research and development of deer birth control and other methods to ensure deer to not populate these areas in the first place.

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IV Cruelty of hunting deer

Hunting is a cruel sport that should be ended. Many hunters will say it is a long held tradition. However there are many cultural traditions that are cruel and therefore should be ended. And also hunting just for the sake of the hunt, is barely a tradition, coming into being only after the invention of firearms and then not becoming a popular activity until Europeans overran America, in the 1700s and 1800s. And there was major extermination of many animals in this period, where they were killed not only for their furs and meat, but also because some of the white men who invaded America just enjoyed killing. There are records of some men killing literally hundreds of deer or buffalo in one day, just to see them fall and die.

The only reason hunting continues on in the present day, it that it is done away from the eyes of the general public. And also there is some kind of undeserved trust put into the public institutions of the departments of Fish and Wildlife, where people assume that what is allowed under their supervision is somehow humane or necessary. And in fact this is not the case. The general awareness of people about the need for compassion for all creatures, has not yet reached into the spheres of government that supervise the wild animals and wild forests. The matters are decided by people who work for the departments of Fish and Wildlife. And these decisions are made with the hunter’s and fisherman’s interest in mind. There are quotas set up so that a particular animal will not have too low a population, but beyond that the animals are treated as objects to be hurt and abused for the pleasure of the hunter who purchases the license. It is a blasphemy for these hunters or government officials to claim that they love the animals and that is why they hunt. No one would ever consider someone causing them pain or death to have any kind of love for them. And it is the same for the animals. It is the opposite of love to want to kill an animal just for the sake of enjoying some primordial feeling of dominance at being able to take a life.

If person wants to chose a sport that hones their skills, there are many to chose from that do not involve killing. And if a person wants to enjoy nature, there are also many pursuits available to be out in nature, that do not involve killing an animal. It is a desire from a part of human beings from our distant past, where there was a need to kill in order to survive. However it is no longer necessary and it stands on its own as a singular cruelty that needs to be ended.

Humans have completely dominated the landscape now in North America. There are no places left where humans have not made their mark and taken over the land. The animals have had to learn to cope with human presence and do not live the same normal existence that they did before their territories were taken over by man. Deer and other animals live a life of continual harassment, abuse, terror and death at the hands of human hunters. Deer adapt as best they can to circumvent any human interaction, altering their activities, moving only in the early mornings or at night, which is not as they would behave if they were not in fear of their lives.

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And then there is the chase. This causes stress and terror to the animal, just as it would to a human being chased and running for their lives. Books on deer hunting talk about deer that are chased for long periods and become so stressed, that adrenaline hormones are pumped throughout their body, and their meat becomes stiff and is not eatable afterwards.

Many deer are shot at with bullets or arrows, and only receive small wounds. The deer escapes and the wound becomes infected, or the deer slowly bleeds to death much later. Or a deer may receive a stronger wound that makes it unable to run, and then it lays in fear while the hunter comes to get it and shoot it another time until it dies.

Some states still allow hunting with dogs, where the dogs run through the woods flushing the deer from the rest in their own bedding. The deer are then run towards the hunters where they are shot at as they pass by. Of course many times the dogs themselves will take down the deer and kill it. Early records about deer mortality talk about how many times whole groups of deer that were holed up in small areas for the winter would be killed by dogs that were allowed to roam freely or feral dogs.

A chapter from the book The Deer of North America, Walter Penn Taylor, entitled “Hunting the Whitetail”, discusses some of the cruelty visited upon the deer by hunters (p. 301):

Crippling and Killing Shots
Any of the common hunting bullets placed in the vital part of a deer will kill it, but the animal first may run a long distance. In heavily hunted whitetail range it is desirable to bring down the deer where it is hit. Head and spinal column shots immobilize the animal quickly, but the target is small. Shots striking the spinal column in the rear portion may permit a deer to travel amazingly fast by dragging the paralyzed hind quarters. Breaking both shoulders or forelegs above the knee joint, or severing the wind pipe or jugular vein will bring a deer down. Heart and lung shots are almost always fatal but may not stop the deer immediately. Lethal paunch shots, except with bullets developing great shock and tissue destruction, may not prevent a long chase.

A running deer suddenly altering its pace often indicates a hit. A wounded deer either may slow or accelerate rapidly. A deer that runs in a “humped up” position, taking short strides, usually has been hit. A heart shot often gives no indication of a hit. Deer have been known to continue at full stride for a short distance with entire hearts shot away. A hit in the front part of the body may cause a deer to rear on its hindlegs; whereas a hit in the rear often will cause the deer to kick like a horse.

A wounded deer will usually lie down in dense cover, and whenever the tracker approaches such places on the trail, he should be ready for action.

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(page 17)

Discovering Arrow-Killed Deer
Once a bow hunter has hit his deer, his hunt may have reached the maximum, but it certainly is not over. When a deer is downed in its tracks with an arrow, it is well for the hunter to hit the animal with a second arrow as quickly as possible. Any animal which drops immediately has been hit somewhere in the spinal column or head. If the arrow cuts the spinal cord, the animal will not get up. If the hit is in one of the bony processes of the vertebra, the deer will go down but may be back up in a short time. For this reason it is well to play safe and shoot the animal again as quickly as possible. If a deer is hit anywhere in the body cavity but gets out of range, it is well for the archer to remain quiet and let the deer slip away without being disturbed. Because the archer shoots from cover and does so without noise, the deer seldom realizes the presence of man and after an initial burst of speed, usually lies down to die. If the hunter rushes after the deer immediately he may cause it to make one last attempt to move into thick cover where the job of relocating the quarry becomes increasingly difficult.

V   Deer and automobiles accidents

Another tragedy of too many deer, is that there becomes an increasing number of deer hit by automobiles. In Pennsylvania for example, there are thousands of auto/deer collisions every year. There are so many deer killed that people are hired to come and remove the deer from the roads, and since there is no where to put them, their bodies are dumped in trash sites. This is a travesty to be treating life in such a throw away manner as this. The Game Commission is directly responsible for this horrible destruction of life by allowing the overpopulations of deer. And it would seem logical that the responsibility for these auto accidents would be placed on the Game Commission by the people who have the accidents, or by the insurance companies who pay insurance for the accidents, and yet they are not held responsible. It should not be taken as a matter of course, that these majestic animals are violently killed by automobiles and left to die on the road. This is an occurrence that should be treated with the gravity it deserves, the unnecessary killing of an animal, with a traumatic and painful death.

From an interview with a worker hired to remove dead deer from Pennsylvania roads, from book Deer Wars, Robert Frye, (p 139).

October, November and December are without doubt Calandrella’s busiest months, though. The onset of the rut – the breeding season for whitetails – and the beginning of the hunting season prompt deer to move more often during daylight hours, when traffic is generally heaviest. The result is that more end up dead along the road. Calandrella has collected as many as 44 deer in a single day and averages 400 to 500 per month during that period.

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(page 18)

Regarding insurance claims, (p 139).

Fall is the prime accident time, with the first day of the firearms season particularly bad. On the first day of the 1998 firearms deer season, for example, Erie Insurance Group recorded more than 150 deer-vehicle collision claims.

The Game Commission used to try to keep track of road-killed deer in the days when its officers were primarily responsible for collecting road-kills. By the late 1990s, it was estimating the number at more than 40,000 annually. With the deer population steadily growing and the number of vehicles on the road increasing at the same time, the number of deer-vehicle collisions is growing.

There’s a cost to all of that carnage, aside from the $1.2 million Pennsylvania Department of Transportation paid to pick up dead deer. According to Department of Transportation records, 30 people died as a result of hitting deer between 1998 and 2002. (p. 142)

In 2002, 16,700 drivers filed a claim for hitting a deer. That works out to be about 15 accidents per 1000 people insured.

Pain and cruelty to deer (p 138)

Says Steve Boeser, the worker paid to pick up the dead deer:
“Their will to live is just outrageous. I’ve found some that had two broken hips that had still managed to get 50 yards off the road before I had to put them down. I’ve seen them run off with two broken front legs, running on their knees.”

Deer for Compost (p 144)
When it comes to deer-vehicle collisions, another issue is what to do with all of those dead deer. If the average deer weighs a hundred pounds, and Calandrella collects 3,000 deer a year, that’s 300,000 pounds of meat and bone that end up in a landfill or at a rendering plant. Contractors pay disposal fees up front but pass the costs on to Department of Transportation and ultimately to taxpayers.

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(page 19)

References

   - Deer of the World, Their Evolution, Behavior and Ecology, Valerius Geist, 1998
   - The Deer, The Indians and the American Pioneers, by Stanley Young, from a book of essays on deer in the book “Deer of North America, Walter Penn Taylor, 1956
   - Deer Wars, Robert Frye, 2006
   - Game Management, Aldo Leopold, 1933
    - A History of Wisconsin Deer, 1946, Ernest Swift
    - Hunting the Whitetail, by Harry D. Ruhl, from a book of essays on deer in the book “Deer of North America, Walter Penn Taylor, 1956
    - Managing American Wildlife, A History of the International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, Dian Olson Belanger
    - Pennsylvania’s Deer Problem, Roger Latham, 1950, Pennsylvania Game News,
    - The Pennsylvania Deer Problem in 1938, Richard Gerstell, Pennsylvania Game News
    - Pennsylvania Game News archive, a selection of cover artwork and articles from PA Game News magazine.

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