To make up for years of writing that tends to annoy people with guns, let me take this opportunity to congratulate Wisconsin’s deer hunters on a job well done.
For decades now, I’ve written one of the few columns in the state about deer hunting from the deer’s point of view. And every year I receive a flood of communications from hunters informing me how totally ignorant I am.
What I fail to realize, they patiently explain, is the vital role in wildlife management that hunters perform for deer when they go up north to blow away Bambi’s mother. If they didn’t reduce the size of the deer herd, they say, there would be too many deer and not enough food for the deer to eat over the winter.
Deer hunters stay up nights worrying about deer nutrition and never once do those deer say “thank you.” Besides, hunters point out, think of all the human lives they save by reducing the number of collisions between automobiles and deer on northern Wisconsin roads.
Not only that, but too many deer can be devastating to Wisconsin’s beautiful, natural vegetation, not to mention lovely suburban landscaping. Consider the lilies of the field. They toil not and neither do they spin, but their brilliant raiment gets ripped to shreds by voracious deer.
Well, it turns out hunters have done such a bang-up job of controlling the deer population that this year’s deer “harvest,” as they like to call it, was the lowest since 1993. During the nine-day gun season, hunters killed 276,985 deer, down 66,782 from a year ago. That was a drop of nearly 20% overall, and in some far northern counties it was more than 30%.
Mission accomplished. The deer in Wisconsin are so well controlled that there are hardly any around to control at all. Hunters now say they can go for days without even seeing a deer. It saves a lot of ammo.
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Falling Numbers
The incredibly shrinking deer herd is even more impressive when you realize Wisconsin hunters are accomplishing it with fewer hunters every year.
Back in 2004, a study by the Wisconsin Conservation Congress and other prohunting groups found that for every 100 hunters who stopped hunting because they stopped breathing, joined PETA or whateveronly 53 new hunters replaced them.
Kids today! All they want to do is sit around playing video games where they pretend to blow away prostitutes and other urban wildlife. But can you get one of them to get up off that couch to go up north to actually kill something? No way.
Concern over the thinning herd of aging deer hunters led Republicans in the Legislature a few years back to try to lower the hunting age from 12 to 8. The idea was to develop a healthy blood lust in children before they got old enough to be distracted by other varieties of lust. Unfortunately, other legislators got scared off by the vision of armed 8-year-olds scampering around the woods with guns as long as they were. The proposal failed.
No problem. Those aging deer hunters, even with their fading eyesight, have wiped out so many deer over the years that they can doze off in their tree stands and never miss a thing.
It’s time for state hunters to rest on their laurels. They should be toasting each other on a job of killing well done. Think of all the healthy meals they have assured for surviving deer families this Christmas. Think of the car repairs they have spared northern Wisconsinites in this troubled economy.
Instead, our selfless hunters always want to do more. A growing number are complaining to the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) that there aren’t nearly enough deer left for them to heroically manage. It turns out hunting is really boring when you actually have to hunt for the deer.
Hunters are never ones to hog credit, though. They do what hunters always do: blame the DNR. Or blame other predatory animals, particularly wolves and bears.
Wolves are icons in Wisconsin. Their pictures appear on state license plates purchased by people who care about the environment. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., recently overturned an attempt by the Bush administration to remove wolves from the endangered species list.
But do wolves appreciate the honored place they hold as a vanishing symbol of the wild and free? Heck no. They behave like a pack of wild animals. They kill deer willy-nilly, not to mention the occasional suburban pet named Fifi. And don’t even ask about what bears do in the woods.
If the DNR expects hunters to continue doing their crack job of deer management, it needs to encourage overpopulation to make it more like shooting deer in a barrel.
What’s your take? Write: editor@shepex.com or comment on this story online at www.expressmilwaukee.com.
