I’m not a huge fan of deer. They’re pretty and have big soulful eyes, and I totally cried like a baby reading The Yearling. Unfortunately, deer are one of those animals that lives too well in human communities, where they overbreed, overgraze and screw up the food chain for other animals (and yes, I am aware that we humans screwed up the food chain by killing off the apex predators that eat deer–at least, the other apex predators that don’t wear blaze orange during hunting season). Deer also carry the ticks that cause Lyme disease, and Lyme disease is brutal. When your kids can’t play in your front yard or run around in the park because of deer ticks, you get surprisingly unsympathetic toward the deer.
That said, when the Washington Post ran this picture, I thought, “Okay, this is fucking ridiculous.”
Photo by Don Chernoff for the Washington Post.
I recommend the accompanying article by Liza Mundy about deer in suburbia. It raises a lot of good questions.
Interesting article. I’m a bit of a tree-hugger — a mammal-hugger, really — so I don’t mind the deer. I chuckled when I read about deer ruining ridiculous suburban landscaping efforts. But I’m a city-dweller whose goal in life is NEVER to have a yard to take care of, so…
That was fascinating– thanks for passing it on. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about our relationships, as humans, to the animals who are starting to thrive in human environments. Are you familiar with TED Talks? They’re basically videos of talks on just about everything– I recently blogged someone’s talk on the intelligence of crows. They are adapting to our environments in very similar ways, although I don’t think their population explosion is having the same sort of environmental impact. And in the case of the deer, though I’m not even a little sympathetic towards all the people whose gardens are being eaten (it mostly made me laugh!) I do get concerned about the forest dying out without new saplings to replace it. I think we need to come up with some kind of long-term relationship with these animals that doesn’t involve constantly exterminating them, but I’m not sure what form it would take.
Oops, meant to include links in the comment– TED Talks here, and my blog post here.
I’m terrified of deer.
First of all, I’m not a native to these parts and having large mammals bumbling about feels a bit bizarre. Second, friend on my mom’s got Lyme disease and it ruined her academic career, and wreaked havoc on her body for years.
And here in Upstate NY it’s crazy. A friend of mine who commutes to the uni has had 3 crashes with dear in a year.
I’ve heard about deer contraception projects to reduce the deer population but I don’t remember how effective they were.
@eloriane: I really like TED Talks! I’ll check those out.
I’m a big garden nut (I do a little here in Brooklyn, but grew up in the deer-y DC suburbs mentioned in this article) but I totally agree with you about the people whose gardens are being eaten. Cry me a river, folks.
If you’re in a high-deer area, use deer-resistant plantings or fence or try to find ways to deal with it (we had to put nets over our apple and peach trees in the spring so they wouldn’t get chewed to nubs by deer). You have to work with the environment, the same as how you wouldn’t plant roses in the shade or banana trees in Zone 4.
But the deer overpopulation has other, bigger problems, like the spread of Lyme–which is a genuinely scary disease–and the death of saplings (problems for birds and insects) and overgrazing (problems for mammals like rabbits, mice, groundhogs, etc. ) Plus, when you have a population explosion, you have deer starving and dying from lack of food or being hit by cars in heavily populated areas. So I’m absolutely in favor of hunting for population control.
God my spelling is horrible. A> friend of my mom’s.
I hate deet, pesky vermin that cause accidents and damage suburbia– especially annoying when that suburbia happens to be the garden that’s supposed to feed your family produce for the summer. The town I grew up in occasionally hires snipers to clear out the deer population some; Its a great alternative because all the meat goes to homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and the like. And deer is damn tasty, so, all in all, an awesome solution.
My boyfriend just told me that he found a tick on his thigh. He’s at a wedding in rural georgia. He was looking at the only store he could find for Vaseline and tweezers. As someone who is terribly afraid of bugs and the wilderness, I didn’t know that you can’t just knock them off–their heads just pop off and that’s even worse? As I was talking to him while he was looking for anti-ticking tools, I realized that as we spoke, at that moment, the tick was still connected to his body. I can’t really handle thinking about that for too long without feeling queasy.
@Amanda: Mmmm…venison. My uncle in Georgia used to kill a couple deer every season and make stew and lasagna out of them.
@Cimorene: Ewwww. Yeah, you can’t just yank them out like you would a thorn. This has happened to me a few times. You have to pull slowwwwwly with tweezers so that the head comes out too. Vaseline doesn’t make much difference–that’s an old wives’ tale. If the head stays stuck in there, he should see a doctor to get it dug out and make sure it doesn’t get infected. It sounds like it’s bigger than a deer tick, though.
Tick visual for identification (gross, but helpful):
http://www.oes.org/html/how_2_identify_different_ticks.html
I don’t mind deer so much. They have ruined my parents’ lawn more than once, but all in all our hatred was reserved for the adorable little bunny rabbits who destroyed the tomatoes on an annual basis (why couldn’t they destroy the zucchini, I ask you? But no, they leave that alone, leaving us with approximately 100 pounds of summer squash to deal with each summer).
I live in a fairly urban New Jersey suburb now – I’m looking outside, and there is no grass anywhere near here – but when I first moved to New York, I lived in Dobbs Ferry, in the woods, and the yard in front of my crappy little basement apartment was filled with with all sorts of wildlife, including rabbits, chipmunks, deer, and…foxes. My cat considered him the lord of all of them, naturally.