Remember the good old days where you used to control the deer population by shooting them to death? These days are a lot like the old days except rather than filling rifles full of bullets, you fill them full of liquid contraceptives. Just aim and fire. Bambi will no longer make babies. At least, that's how they do it in Maryland.
Problem solved, right? Actually, people are up in arms.
Critics of immunocontraception say it is another example of human manipulation of nature, and some hunting organizations say it threatens their sport, according to a 2004 report by Priscilla Cohn, a philosopher and then-professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University who studies animal ethics.
Basically, people are angry because we're trying to impose limits on the deer birthrate and because we are not imposing these limits through killing deer. So if you take the middle ground, people still get pissed off. I'm not going to kid myself and say I didn't expect this.
Just in case some reasonable people read this blog, I'm going to state my opinion. One way or another, deer are going to die. Either it's by us or by some other cause. And guaranteed, some deer will die by us, whether it is intentional or not. Certainly, we can hunt deer, but there's always a jackass who gets too trigger happy. We can try and not "manipulate" nature, but there will be the inevitable conflict, and a human will die when a deer makes its way across a highway, and a car comes comes a-crashing. I know this as it happens every year in Canada.
With these factors into consideration, it's best to eliminate trigger happy jackasses and the likelihood of car collisions. The logical conclusion is contraceptives for deer. I'm betting it works.
1 comments:
One: In Pennsylvania, more deer are killed by cars than by hunters.
Two: a lot of country folk hunt to connect with their ancestors who hunted. I don't hunt, but many men and women where I have lived see this as an ancestral survival skill to be taught from father to son.
Three: Yes, a lot of rich yuppies love those deer antlers, but I always lived in the other side of town, where the coalminers or oil workers hunted to get a hundred pounds of meat for their freezer.(Note: A lot of them poached, but I'll never tell...they needed the food).
I have no problem with birthcontrol for deer in Maryland, but look at the map of Pennsylvania and check out the huge expanses of state game land. Now, how will they hire enough hunters to hit all those deer?
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