Asymmetrical Information

I'd like to know more about how hunting could be conducted in a meaningful way in suburban zones infested with deer, like Central New Jersey.

My parents have a small house in Princeton Twp. on about 1/3 of an acre. On Thanksgiving morning, we sat in the kitchen as not 25 feet away six deer lounged around the back yard, nibbling grass, pooping, and running in circles. They were all tagged multiple times (ears and collar) and some wore radio transmitters. This is a common occurrence. Can hunting really work in a densely populated area?

"... everyone who eats meat should, at least once, kill something so that they can see just exactly what their culinary enjoyment entails."

Well, by that logic:

1. Everyone who eat oranges should, at least once, plant orchards so that they can see just exactly what their culinary enjoyment entails.

2. Everyone who drives cars should, at least once, build a car so that they can see just exactly what their transportation needs entail.

3. Everyone who reads books (blogs) should, at least once, write a book (blog) so that they can see just exactly what their reading enjoyment entails.

4. Everyone who votes should, at least once, run for office so that they can see just exactly what their political actions entail.

Etc.

I thought the whole point of a capitalist system is that it enabled efficient specialization of occupation so we didn't all need to understand and experience everything required for each of our consumptive and maintenance activities.

If I had to, I'd be willing to kill and prepare meat. Since I don't, I have absolutely no interest in doing so.

Only the most politically myopic don't see that hunters and environmentalists are natural allies.

The environmental lobby and the gun lobby would make a powerfull partnership.

I'd like to know more about how hunting could be conducted in a meaningful way in suburban zones infested with deer, like Central New Jersey.

This sounds sarcastic, but I mean it. I don't know anything about hunting and NJ has a huge deer problem.

heavily suburban areas are best situated for bow hunting (since it's easier to control and arrows don't go through houses)... it's harder, but...

and with more culling in wilder places, deer pop will even out, as deer prefer calmer environments (suburbs are like manhattan for deer.. though with great catering)

"Can hunting really work in a densely populated area?"

hey has already answered this question by pointing out that bow hunting is perfect for urban areas. But be advised that it's going to be a politically unpopular solution, since the deer usually are wounded and manage to run for some distance before finally falling over from blood loss.

In an environment Brittain33 describes, you'd have wounded deer bounding over fences and running through back yards until they keel over on someone's patio. Next thing you know you'd have some angry citizens on the phone with the local mayor.

There's also the problem with access. Hunters need to be able to get to where the deer hang out, and then wander around some. This is due to the fact that the deer have to first be stalked, and then tracked after they're wounded. Nothing like having a guy in camo fatigues carrying a bow wander past the swing set you put up last summer.

James

I suppose you could make it legal for people to hunt deer in their own yards. If enough did, the deer would either move away, or, I suppose, stop moving....

Farmers have been complaining about the hooved locusts for a long time. It's almost funny that biologists and ecologists have finally gotten a clue. (actually, some did long ago)

Herds must be managed. If the wolves don't do it then people will have to take up the slack. I'd like to see wolves introduced to New York and New Jersey for deer control. Maybe some big cats too. To continue Bret's "Everyone who" list I'd add that everyone who advocates the introduction of top predators to ecosystems should live with them.

Hunting deer in suburban areas safely is most effectively (and safely) done in a fairly organized fashion, rather than the "1 man with a gun" methods that sportsmen prefer and laws designed for rural hunting support. The best method is to drive the deer (which used to be a common method of hunting but has been outlawed in many jurisdictions as unsporting.) Basically, find an area that is a safe target zone where deer hide(e.g. a park, small woods, stream, etc.) Post some of the hunters along the boundary between the target area and the area where the deer are (the suburb); the hunters would be armed with shotguns loaded with buckshot, not rifles. Another group of hunters walks through the area to be hunted, making noise, disturbing the thickets, etc. As the deer move from where they are to the target zone, shoot them--shooting toward the target zone.

This is very similar to the way pheasants are hunted in England; it is a slaughter, not sportsman-like hunting.

Perhaps I'm missing the point since I don't have a WSJ login, but why exactly do these herds need to be culled so? Is it so bad that the deers are killing the forestry before the housing industry can do the same?

And if there is a good reason, why do hunters need to be involved when we could simply poison them?

With regard to carnivores hunting their own food, we shouldn't punish the deer to gain our carnal knowledge and should perhaps open up cow-hunting season (or a season for slow elk as we called them in the midwest).

Bret, I think that specialization means we no longer have to kill our meat to live, but I don't think that it means we can be wilfully ignorant of how our consumables are made.

Understanding how tomato plants grow to produce tomatos, and how a car is made is invaluable; heck, I take my kids to sawmills and manufacturing plants for tours so that they can see what happens to a tree to make lumber, etc. I also take them to dad's place in the back woods to "put up" 40 chickens a year for the pot.

When we eat meat without any real understanding that a death is involved, we have divorced the action from the consequence. Killing a chicken, then roasting it up for dinner wonderfully clarifies exactly what meat is, and what it takes to put it on the table.

This is false in an interesting way. Focusing on a single aspect of the food chain, one known and selected precisely for its squick factor, while ignoring the more diffuse but very much more lethal aspects of agriculture, is a method designed to deceive. More death is caused by a corn field than a slaughter house. More death of doe eyed animals that tug your heart as well as their beaky cousins is caused by field and row cropping than all the hunters and cowboys combined. And that doesn't count soil life, rodents, bugs and other less charismatic life forms. Unless you synthesize your food out of air and space rocks you kill to live.

For those in New Jersey wondering how they can hunt deer in a surburban setting I offer the following suggestion - TASER.

A system not larger than what is in use now by police departments would suffice. That and a non-conductive spear to dispatch Bambi to the perpetual dirt nap.

why kill bambi?

they are destroying parks and damaging the ecology of ecological preserves, specifically selecting for a type of forest, one that is especially unfriendly towards hardwoods... so much for sarcasm

why hunt bambi?

poisoning is indiscriminate, you just leave bait out and animals eat it... no real control on what animals... this is the forest (or open suburb) not an apartment (where you put combat out of the way and even then have to worry bout pets and kids). poisoning would kill lots of everythings thats smaller than a deer, especially mammals (dogs, cats, raccoons, foxes, 6 year olds, etc) and you have no idea how many you killed. hunting is specific, targeted, and trackable.

why are humans so mean?

top of the food chain has privileges... deer would eat you if they could (and they do kill lots of people every year, through impromptu road bumps)

cj,

We have no choice to be willfully ignorant regarding how most consumables are made. For example, from the famous essay "I, Pencil" (http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html):

"Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me [the pencil]"

Sure, you may know how major parts of a car are assembled, but could you really build a car, even a simple one from scratch? In other words, would you even know how to begin to build a smelter for Iron from your bare hands? Do you know how to create a mine? Do you know the correct mixes and temperatures to create steel? How to build the tools that allow you to shape it? Do you know the formulas for building the plastics use to make the dashboard? Even if you could extract some crude oil from the ground, do you have any idea how to distill it into the polymers required to make plastics? Could you fabricate the distillary?

It would take a lifetime to learn how to do even a small fraction of what it takes to build a car (or even a pencil) from raw materials.

Yet I'm pretty sure I could figure out how to kill and butcher a deer. In a high density deer population area, I'd bet I could even figure out how to do it using only raw materials (stones, foliage, friends, etc.).

But I still have no interest in doing so.

I'm all for reintroducing large predators -- sure, they'll take a few people along with the deer, but think of the frisson that'll add to bowhunting!

We have high speed rats in my neck of the woods too. I've had three close calls; actually smacking one of them upside da hade with the mirror of my van.

There are three kinds of Nature; animal, plant and natural disaster. You can only like one of them, because they are mutually exclusive groups.

I made a few notes on country living and the problems with 'loving nature' if anyone's interested. Go to
http://italicsminecom.blogspot.com/2004/10/so-naturally-i-moved-to-country.html

I have a freezer full of venison with some wonderful recipes to go with it.

In my native Mississippi, in many camps you're required to kill a certain number of doe each season. It's two this year in one camp I know of. This is done specifically to manage the deer population. Hunters prefer to keep the population in check to help grow spectacular bucks instead of scrawny spikes. And it's also good for the environment.

Many hunting/fishing camps have professional environmental regulators that tell them what they need to do to achieve optimal ecological balance. Which hunters want for the best hunting and trophies.

And I've killed, cooked and eaten my own game.

I don't hunt anymore b/c I'm stuck in lovely Alexandria, VA and my stomping grounds were back home in Mississippi.

The reintroduction of Wolves into the Research Triangle might have stopped Big Arm Woman's domestic tragedy, too.

cj - well stated.

bret - we can't understand everything, but we can strive to increase our understanding of all things in our lives. it makes us more conscious of everyday activities.

I live in North Georgia. Last week I killed Bambi's mother with the front end of my oldsmobile! $2500 damage. The wife of guy I work with killed four last year. Her insurance company told her those were her fault. They cancelled her insurance and now she has to find a way to work. Believe me, the road I travel 10 miles each way on every day, has at least three to five new auto/truck kills per week, year round. The deer are a plague, we are now controlling them with our cars, there needs to be a better way.

Someone in my lab hit a deer at 70mph while returning from Maine this weekend. Car took a licking, but luckily no human was hurt. Deer was not so lucky.

Jim - I completely agree that understanding as much as possible is generally a good thing. But there are tradeoffs and the time (and not to mention the money required) I could spend figuring out how to hunt and butcher deer (getting guns, licenses, etc.) could be better spent learning about stuff that's more important to me. Megan's argument that all meat eaters should go hunting falls apart when considering we all have different priorities about what is important.

This problem could have been managed 25 years ago.

The folks who are appalled at the idea of thinning the herds are actually contributing to their death by starvation due to over population.

I suggest that it is Hollywood's time to step up to the plate and create an adopt-a-deer celebrity telethon.

I hear they're going crazy over Llamas

Venison=good

Too much venison=bad

Can't we all just get along?

BAM!

Over population can wipe out a whole herd in a bad winter. The first breeding year a doe has a bambi; each year thereafter, she has twins. I live only 20 miles north of NYC and have seen our local herd grow to incredible numbers. It looks to be a hard winter here for them because they have already started eating the bushes in my yard that they didn't touch until January last year.

"Harvesting" deer is a necessity and protects the remaining herd. As their food becomes scarse, deer suffer terrible starvation. On a visit to Pebble Beach, CA, I noticed deer all over the golf course.
Unphased by the golf carts and humans around them, they wandered closer to us. My husband pointed out how their horns were asymentrical and deformed -- a clear sign of malnutrition.

Only bow hunting is permitted in our county. But my husband "sings the same song" as James Rummel....it requires reeducation of our neighbors before you can go trekking through their yard in cammo!

All this about deer populations, doe/buck ratios, and the necessity of thinning the herd every year by killing does as well as bucks was quite well understood 40 years ago. It's a problem only because so many people react with gross irrationality in regards to hunting (including the "bucks only" hunters as well as the PETA types).

And the reason that everyone should kill their own meat at least once is to reduce the number of people that are voting on animal control, agricultural, and many other issues out of sentimental irrationality. "Killing your own meat" doesn't require that you become a hunter. Just buy a live chicken. By the time it's ready to eat, either you'll be a whole lot less squeamish, or you'll have removed yourself from the top of the food chain and be so clearly irrational on any subject related to killing that everyone else will disregard your opinions.

My own disclosure: I grew up on a farm. I've eaten many hunks of critters I raised myself, from chickens to beef. It does take a little something to get down the first piece of beef from a calf you fed for two years. (On the other hand, experience with chickens tends to make you wish butchering time would come sooner.) I don't hunt, but I have often helped my in-laws process their deer, and I prefer properly-dressed venison to beef. Nowadays my eyesight is too bad for me to safely identify the target when other hunters are around, but mainly I didn't learn to hunt as a kid. My father objected to hunting, not in principle, but because he was raised on woodchuck, rabbits, and so on (out of necessity), and just didn't want to eat any more game when he was making enough to buy meat...

I'm a vegetarian, but I've always supported hunting for population control. I've also been known to say that if I raised Henny or Bunny or even Bambi myself and absolutely knew every bite the animal ate and that it was in perfect health, I wouldn't hesitate to kill and eat it. Really. I even have a passing knowledge of how to kill and process the carcass. This makes me a very strange vegetarian, but OK.

That said, is it necessarily SAFE to eat venison from deer that are so malnourished they can't make horn properly? Don't they go grubbing in backyards to try to find food? Aren't they much more susceptible to disease from the overcrowding and malnutrition, if nothing else?

Many less rural areas have shotgun only seasons to reduce the possibility of a long range stray bullet. An unrifled large bore firearm is effective at normally short woodland hunting ranges and and the large, blunt, slow projectile quickly loses speed to air resistance.

Perhaps if we could teach the deer marketable skills...

I'd like to know more about how hunting could be conducted in a meaningful way in suburban zones infested with deer, like Central New Jersey.

Blowpipe and tranq darts?

Perhaps if we could teach the deer marketable skills...

They already have one. Venison (and elk) make a great substitute for beef and are very lean, so you can combine them with fattening cheese and bacon with a lot less guilt.

Re: deer control in urban areas. In my town (pop 80,000) in Iowa, the deer were a menace. For the lest several years, the city has hired a company of sharpshooters to come in for a week and kill a couple hundred deer. I think that's probably the safest and most efficient method of urban deer control.

ROTFLMAO at the italicsmine and Big Arm Woman links....

Regarding the taking of deer in populated areas, I have given this a bit of thought in the past.  The big difficulty is to prevent missiles from going off one's own property and posing a threat to neighbors, their pets and property; the secondary issue is tracking down the game once hit.  (The Taser idea is clever and deals with that.)

It occurs to me that another "hunting" practice has already dealt with these difficulties:  spearfishing with spearguns.  The spear is attached to a line which prevents the fish from getting away, assuming the head does not pull back out.  Is a deer strong enough to pull the head of a spear (thinking something that comes off the spear shaft and turns sideways) back through its ribcage against the pull of a bungee-damped steel or Kevlar tether?  Neither missile nor target can go very far, and if fired from an upstairs window you could guarantee that any misses remained on the property.

I keep reading about herds of deer calmly scarfing down acres of suburban landscaping and wondering how much it would take to get homeowners and game authorities sufficiently exercised to investigate something truly new.

E-P: I'm sure it would be possible to have a harpoon head that would hold, but you'd better have that tether very well anchored. I get this mental picture of a deer dragging you out of an upstairs window and over a fence before expiring in the neighbors yard. Deer are nearly as big as humans and have an advantage in traction - and their nervous system is tuned to run at any unusual stimulus and figure out what it was later.

Bowhunters have told me of deer that were hit perfectly - putting the broadhead through lung, heart, other lung - and still ran 100 yards. In rural Michigan, that's just an annoying little tracking job (although it's a reason bowhunters often attach a long, bright colored thread to their arrows). In suburbia, 100 yards might cover several backyards.

Guns deliver more shock, and sometimes will knock the deer down on the spot, but no one can hit every deer just right. You aim perfectly, but the deer jumps just as you shoot, and you're following a trail of leaking intestinal contents for miles.

I think the best choice for deer population control in populated areas would be an expert carrying a 12 gauge with buckshot. You have to get close to the deer, but you're hunting ones that don't have much fear of humans left. It delivers a devastating shock, and the shot that misses won't penetrate skin at 100 yards. Still, there are going to be times when the neighbors are just going to have to be understanding about armed men following a blood trail across their yard.

Speedwell's concern about eating quality are probably well-founded. The taste of venison varies with the deer's diet and condition, and I'd think one that's half-starved and dining off of ornamental shrubs is going to taste bad. Of course, there's always road-kill helper (chili). Also, if the deer is malnourished, it's also far more likely to have parasites and other diseases. Thorough cooking kills most parasites, but some disease organisms can survive, and a few of these can infect humans. E.g., bovine tuberculosis can pass from cows to deer, spreads from deer to deer when they feed together, and humans can catch it from the meat.

Incidentally, things like bovine tuberculosis are another reason less deer are being taken by hunters. Several Michigan counties are now off-limits to regular hunting because the deer herds are infected. Baiting (putting out piles of apples, corn cobs, or other deer feed) has been banned, not because it's unsporting (many less-skilled hunters aren't ever going to get close enough to get a good shot at a deer any other way), but because deer eating at the piles will share slobber and spread tuberculosis.

Similarly, rabbit hunting has practically disappeared because of a parasite that is very bad for humans. (Tularemia?) I wonder if humans with cars are somehow spreading parasites and diseases to game animals, of if these things were there all along, and we're just now coming to hear about the dangers. I mean, Daniel Boone had to worry about bears, Indians, and starvation when the snow got too deep to travel or hunt. A suspicious hunk of venison was the least of his worries...

""Harvesting" deer is a necessity and protects the remaining herd. As their food becomes scarse, deer suffer terrible starvation. On a visit to Pebble Beach, CA, I noticed deer all over the golf course.

Unphased by the golf carts and humans around them, they wandered closer to us. My husband pointed out how their horns were asymentrical and deformed -- a clear sign of malnutrition."

Happily, at least one mountain lion has moved into the Asilomar/Spanish Bay/PB habitat...although that's a bit thrilling for the the tourists.

" Is a deer strong enough to pull the head of a spear (thinking something that comes off the spear shaft and turns sideways) back through its ribcage against the pull of a bungee-damped steel or Kevlar tether?  Neither missile nor target can go very far, and if fired from an upstairs window you could guarantee that any misses remained on the property."

Depends upon the species, but probably. We tried roping some deer last year, it was not a pretty picture, even with two pretty stout and experienced hands doing the roping.

Myself, I am in favor of bait and cull of some sort

You'd definitely have to anchor the tether to something strong.

Combining the tethered spear with the Taser idea might be best of all; you'd be able to knock down the prey with the electric shock and immobilize it while the physical trauma does the rest.  Best of all, this would completely avoid the problem of gunshots in populated areas; I'm pro-hunting but I could not take the noise of a rifle going off within 50 yards of my house.

Big government needs to get involved with the lives of hunters, apparently. Is there nothing the evil leviathan won't do?

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