Tag: HSUS

Summary: Staten Island is confronting urban deer overabundance with a plan to sterilize all of its male deer. Animal rights groups praise the plan as forward looking and humane, but it is neither. It will be difficult to implement, wildly expensive, and it will alter the reproductive behavior of male and female deer, leading to an increase in vehicular collisions and physiological stress. A deer cull — possible even in Staten Island — would give the remaining deer a more natural life and improve deer-human interactions.

Narrow channels isolate Staten Island (red) from New Jersey (orange) and New York City (yellow). https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10668334

In Ann Arbor deer management has been a hot news item for nearly a year. When it comes to non-lethal methods, someone occasionally  brings up the possibility of buck sterilization (i.e. vasectomy). The idea is rejected fairly quickly. Unlike the more sedentary female deer (does) bucks travel broadly and they are polygamous; i.e. they will mate as often and with as many females as they can. If you manage to sterilize one buck, another will come to take its place. Read More

Summary: Following a controversial deer cull, the city of Ann Arbor is considering non-lethal methods to deal with its burgeoning deer population. The Humane Society of America (HSUS) has aggressively promoted these methods in Ann Arbor and elsewhere but their scientific rationale is misleading at best. This post discusses biological misinformation at the heart of the HSUS deer campaign.

Whitetail deer photographed from an Ann Arbor home on January 20, 2016. The large numbers of yearlings suggest that the herd is undergoing an exponential growth phase.

Ann Arbor recently approved a deer cull in which marksmen shot 63 deer; the venison was distributed to the needy. Although the cull was planned with public input and an emphasis on safety, opposition groups protested relentlessly and filed lawsuits (some still pending) to halt the cull. A full listing of MLIVE articles on the topic can be found here. The timeline and local political context can be found here and here.
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