Thursday, November 09, 2006

MYTHS AND FACTS ABOUT DEER MANAGEMENT

This comes to us from the Newtown Bee Newspaper (Connecticut). Nice job!

Increasing awareness of the overpopulation of deer in Connecticut has given rise to many misconceptions and "urban myths" about deer, their role in the spread of Lyme disease, and in the destruction of native woodlands. As a member community of the Fairfield County Municipal Deer Management Alliance, Newtown benefits from the expertise of its members and has hosted talks on the subject of Lyme disease and deer management through local organizations including the Rotary and Kevin's Community Center.

QUESTION: Isn't Lyme disease spread by white footed mice, not deer?

ANSWER: Lyme disease is caused by a bacterium that is carried by the deer tick. While it is true that the bacteria is introduced into the tick by the white footed mouse, it is the white-tailed deer that is responsible for the increasing number of deer ticks. Without deer the tick cannot reproduce as it requires a large blood meal from a white tail deer. The deer is the host of choice for the adult tick. Each deer can carry about 500 ticks. Each adult female tick can lay 3,000 eggs. Programs carried out in Maine and Connecticut show conclusively that when deer numbers are reduced sufficiently, Lyme disease is reduced dramatically. Other animals do not substitute for the deer. (Kilpatrick and LaBonte 2003)

QUESTION: Why don't we use contraception to control deer populations?

ANSWER: A $5 million experimental program funded by the New Jersey League of Municipalities has recently been dropped due to failure. The contraceptive tested, at a cost of $1,000 per doe, did not work. There is no contraceptive available.

For now and for the foreseeable future there is no tested contraceptive that actually works on wild deer. If and when it becomes available the drugs will only keep the herd from growing; they will not reduce the size of an existing herd.

QUESTION: Are there more deer-car accidents during the hunting season because hunters scare deer onto the roads?

ANSWER: No. Most deer-vehicle accidents happen after dark or before daybreak when there are no hunters out. There are more deer-vehicle accidents on Sundays (when there is no hunting at all) than Saturdays. Hunting season and the annual deer rut (mating season) coincide in late fall. During the rut, deer are energized by the mating instinct and often cross roads while pursuing does or being pursued by bucks. Also the shorter days during fall and winter mean that high traffic occurs at dawn and dusk when more deer are moving around.

No scientific data supports the claim that hunting activity increases the rate of deer-vehicle accidents. Instead, a review of data provided by the Department of Transportation supports the fact that vehicular traffic patterns influence deer vehicle accidents. Removing deer through hunting or other deer management techniques is an effective method to reduce deer populations, which will result in fewer deer-vehicle accidents.

QUESTION: If you start culling deer, is it true that the remaining deer will just start giving birth to more fawns than usual?

No, this only occurs if the deer population is so stressed by starvation that their birth rates are depressed prior to culling. Following a cull of the population, birth rates would return to normal causing population recovery. This does not apply in the case of our deer control programs since the deer populations are still healthy and increasing. Deer reproduction in our region remains a constant 1.77 fawns per doe per year according to deer biologists.

QUESTION: Which is more dangerous, hunting or Lyme disease?

ANSWER: Hunting is one of the safest outdoor activities. All hunters must pass many hours of safety instruction before they can obtain a license. There have been no nonhunter injuries in the history of controlled deer management hunts in Connecticut. There were more than 40,000 new cases of physician confirmed Lyme disease in Connecticut alone in 2002. There are also untold numbers of undiagnosed cases of Lyme that go on to develop serious cardiac, neurological, and arthritic complications. The number increases every year. There are also an average of 100 deer-vehicle accidents per town in Fairfield County each year adding to the dangers of excess deer.

QUESTION: Isn't the understory of the forest being destroyed by the canopy of mature trees and not by the deer?

ANSWER: No, the natural cycle of the forest is for mature trees to drop seeds to reseed the forest. This new growth is protected by the forest canopy from the drying sun during their early growth period. The deer, however, are selectively eating these young seedlings and wildflowers. We cannot blame this lack of understory on the "maturing forest" and "natural succession" as some would have us believe. According to forestry experts at Yale, these Fairfield County woods are not mature woodlands; they are intermediate in their development and would require at least another 50 years of growth to reach the stage of maturity that might cause loss of diversity due to dense shading of the forest floor. There is also evidence from forest and wildlife experts at the Connecticut Agriculture Experiment Station that deer are helping in the spread of invasive plants such as Japanese Barberry.

QUESTION: Is there any risk of reducing deer so low that they become endangered?

ANSWER: It is not the goal of Connecticut deer management programs to reduce the deer to critically low numbers. Further, it has become so difficult now to reduce deer numbers in Fairfield County because of lack of access to land and lack of local hunters that it may be hard to achieve adequate reduction of deer numbers, let alone go too far. Population reduction would obviously stop if numbers reached the ideal level of 10 to 12 deer per square mile. A maintenance plan would then be implemented that might include contraception if an effective one became available.

QUESTION: Why not just spray the yard for ticks or kill ticks on deer using the "4-poster device"?

ANSWER: The tick killing chemicals used are toxic to children, the environment, and water supply unless used very carefully. The 4-poster device (used to spread tick killing chemicals onto the heads of feeding deer) is at risk of spreading chronic wasting disease (CWD) through the deer herd by attracting groups of deer to feed at the corn feeder. CWD is a fatal slow virus disease similar to mad cow disease and has recently been shown (Science: October 6, 2006) to be spread through deer saliva, which is an obvious risk at communal feeding stations such as the 4-poster device. Furthermore, the deer are causing more problems than Lyme disease alone. Killing ticks will not stop destruction of the forest nor deer-vehicle accidents.

This information is provided as a service by the municipally appointed volunteer members of the 16-town Fairfield County Municipal Deer Management Alliance, which aims to promote regional approaches to the multiple problems of deer overpopulation. For more details on these topics, sources and graphs, and for more FAQs on deer management go to www.deeralliance.com.

4 comments:

CarolineTC said...

If its about "reduction" why is your disgusting kind "producing" deer?

"Thus, late fall up to early winter is very important for deer herd managers to impact and influence fawn production, so make sure the plant communities on your property is properly managed deer habitat. " Deer Hunting and Management TX

"Some people disagree with shooting antlerless deer; they reason that protecting them -- thus maintaining a maximum breeding base -- will assure large numbers of antlered bucks because terrific numbers of deer will be born each year and button bucks wouldn't be harvested. "PA. Game Commission


"Historically in all states, including West Virginia, hunting regulation have been restrictive during the period of deer restoration with mainly short buck-only season to protect does and encourage deer population growth." Fundamentals of Deer Management W. VA.


" Fawn crop is often density dependent. Generally, as doe numbers increase, fawn production per doe decreases. Fewer does can and often do raise more fawns to weaning age than more abundant does." QDM

P.129 "With supplemental feeding, it becomes very easy to maitain artificialy high deer densities and still obtain adequate results in terms of antler and body growth." Producing Quality Whitetails Revised Edition
Al Brothers and Murphy E. Ray, Jr. Edited by Charly McTee

" Thus, does are healthier, reproductive
success is higher and more does are able to carry two fawns. Ironically, this can result in a greater deer harvest each year." Quality Deer Management

"With high quality habitat and increased nutrition, the percentage of doe fawns that breed their first fall increases (sometimes up to 25 percent).. Also, a higher percentage of yearling does produce two fawns instead of one." Quality Deer Management

"production" "fawn recruits" "fawn crops" "kill predators", "supplement feeding" "food plots" "restoration" "provide" (of deer)

Does not sound to me like hunter's intention is for "reduction" but to ensure that wildlife serial killers will have an abundance of deer to kill year after year thus high DVA's with human injuries and death.

Lyme disease are high in PA yet they are one of the most heavily hunted states.

Hunting industry will make every excuses in the book to kill the sadistic killing going with no regards to any life whether be human or non-human animals.

CarolineTC said...

You say: "ANSWER: A $5 million experimental program funded by the New Jersey League of Municipalities has recently been dropped due to failure. The contraceptive tested, at a cost of $1,000 per doe, did not work. There is no contraceptive available."

**


All lies from the pro-kill website. Its not "1,000 per deer" according to Jay Kirkpatrick Phd. a wildlife contraception expert. This is what he wrote when he had to correct PA Game commission (Mr. Feaser) misleading statement about deer birth control.

"Next. Mr. Feaser tackles the economic dimensions of deer contraception. He
quotes a figure of $1,000 per deer. The cost of the vaccine is $21/dose (we,
by law, must provide it at our cost of production, with no profit), the dart
costs about $1.50, and the bulk of the labor to do the darting is where the
real cost lies. Costs will vary from site to site, depending on who is doing
the work and what they are paid. If you want to pay someone $80,000 a year
to dart deer, the cost will be high; if you want to use trained volunteers
the cost is less; if you use employees already employed by a park, or
agency, or whatever, the cost is somewhere between. I actually can't say
what the costs would be in any given site because of these variables, but I
kept the books for the first two years of the Fire Island project and the
costs never exceeded $10,000. That included a two or three air fares from
Ohio and Montana to New York, and we treated about 150 deer. My math shows
that to come out to about $66/deer. I wonder who estimated the $1,000 per
deer."


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aANcNyYbLpw

"60% reduction in the size of the deer herd" Jay Kirkpatrick Phd.

Deer Contraception "WORKS AND IT WORKS WELL" according to Jay Kirkpatrick Phd. The guy doing this blogger and many pro-kill advocates are no "expert" in the field of wildlife contraception they just want to deceive the public.

CarolineTC said...

You say: "ANSWER: No. Most deer-vehicle accidents happen after dark or before daybreak when there are no hunters out"

***

First of all where are all the deer coming from? Why DVA's are on the rise and deer numbers are as well if its about "reduction"? Here is why....

P.129 "With supplemental feeding, it becomes very easy to maitain artificialy high deer densities and still obtain adequate results in terms of antler and body growth." Producing Quality Whitetails Revised Edition
Al Brothers and Murphy E. Ray, Jr. Edited by Charly McTee

" Thus, does are healthier, reproductive
success is higher and more does are able to carry two fawns. Ironically, this can result in a greater deer harvest each year." Quality Deer Management

"With high quality habitat and increased nutrition, the percentage of doe fawns that breed their first fall increases (sometimes up to 25 percent).. Also, a higher percentage of yearling does produce two fawns instead of one." Quality Deer Management

They are PRODUCING DEER for sports hunting,. Whitetails make up 70% of the blood money coming in from the sports hunting industry and they need the abundance that is why they reject deer birth control and lies to public about the effectiveness and cost as human continue to die from DVA's. Look at those quotes and they use compensatory rebound effect in their favor.



"Because fawns are born at approximately a 1:1 sex ratio, more bucks maybe born each year. Therefore, in some areas, you actually can increase the number of bucks born by shooting more does." Quality Deer Management



“By keeping the deer population below the carrying capacity of the available habitat, more forage (nutrition) is available per deer. Thus, does are healthier, reproductive success is higher and more does are able to carry two fawns. Ironically, this can result in a greater deer harvest each year. Depending on the relationship of the population and the carrying capacity, an „optimum sustained yield‟ can be achieved where a relatively high reproductive rate allows an abundant harvest each fall. With high-quality habitat and increased nutrition, the percentage of
doe fawns that breed their first fall increases (sometimes up to 25 percent). Also, a higher percentage of yearling does produce two fawns instead of one. Because fawns are born at approximately a 1:1 sex ratio, more bucks may be born each year. Therefore, in some areas, you actually can increase the number of bucks born by shooting more does.” “Quality Deer Management: Guidelines for Implementation,” 6. Agricultural Extension Service, The University of Tennessee. http://www.utextension.utk.edu/publications/pbfiles/pb1643.pdf (last accessed November 2008)


cont

CarolineTC said...

Now about "no hunters out at night" another misleading statement from the wildlife killing industry.

Here is what hunters says is the best time to hunt deer

What is the best time of day to deer hunt?

" Most hunters seem to prefer early and late. Deer are moving in the mornings back to their beds from feeding, and visa versa in the evening going to the fields to feed. "

"Best time to hunt deer is early morning and evening. Deer are mostly nocturnal animals; they prefer to feed at night. In the mornings, you will see them as they to into the woods to find a nice safe place to bed down for the day. In the evening, right before dusk, they start moving around, as they are hungry and want to go out again and feed."



What is the peak hours of DVA's?


The peak time according to Ontario Transportation is early morning (5am-7am) and after sunset (5pm-11pm) in NY D.E.C it says " with most of the collisions occurring between 6:30 and 7:30 AM and 4:30 and 6:30 PM" in another it says "Be especially alert driving between sundown and sunrise". Here is another ...* "Deer Vehicle Accidents are most likely to occur between 5 AM - 8 AM and 5 PM - 9 PM." And remember this... The report also confirms that most wild animal collisions occur during early morning (5am-7am) or after sunset (5pm-11pm).

**Deer hunting is permitted one half hour before sunrise and one half hour after sunset.

Plus hunters are in the woods at night you don't think they just kill the deer and magically "poof" they are out of the forest. Hunters will be in the woods tracking wounded deer or retrieving them sometime inviting other bubbahs to help. They even have a special light called "chemlight" to track wounded deer.

Even your own people say hunting causes DVA's

“With a lot of hunters in the woods, they will push deer out of wooded areas, making them run across the road,” Missouri Department of Conservation Agent Dan Akin said.