Michael Meador

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  Michael commented on the article | over 2 years ago

  Take Action! Save the Deer of Cayuga Heights

  Perhaps you'd be interested in the perspective of an animal rights protector who spent a decade as an environmental educator and who is also a resident of Cayuga Heights.  For the last fifteen years, my family has lived here on a one-acre lot adjacent to a forested stream. We’ve tried to create a wildlife-friendly habitat, reducing the amount of mowed lawn, eliminating traditional landscaping that deer like to eat, and building bird- and small-mammal-friendly brush piles.
  
  We appreciate and are careful to protect the collection of critters that live on or visit our property, including raccoons, woodchucks, muskrats, skunks, red and grey squirrels, chipmunks, frogs, ducks, geese, crows, and many species of songbirds.  But we are powerless to protect that wildlife habitat from the destruction of foliage and undergrowth brought on by the gross overpopulation of deer.
  
  Excess deer are also attracting other critters that are even less appropriate for a human-populated neighborhood. Less than a week ago, a red fox trotted across our backyard.  The joy and excitement of seeing it was quickly tempered by the realization that it was headed straight for the pungent deer carcass a few yards upwind of our house.  Finding easy food in a human neighborhood means that the fox is likely to return, bringing an enhanced threat of rabies and exposing this out-of-place predator to inevitable execution.
  
  Does the deer overpopulation problem impact us directly?  Of course, in many ways.  Aside from lyme disease (a neighbor's small child got it last year) and other serious deer-related health problems, one modest example occurred just three weeks ago when a doe climbed four steps, crossed our 12-ft-wide deck, and devoured a large potted tomato plant in full bloom. This is trivial – we can buy more tomatoes - but it illustrates the unhealthy acclimation of deer to an environment that is alien to their natural existence.  The real problem is that we can’t restore natural flora in the surrounding woods that’s being eroded by the growing herds of deer.  One of those many herds traverses our yard several times a day and numbers 12-15, and if all the fawns survive, will be close to doubling itself this year).
  
  The absence of predators and hunters in a built environment has resulted in a gross imbalance in our local ecosystem, and the deer herd must be significantly reduced for the long-term benefit of what’s left of the overall natural environment in the village.  Otherwise, the negative impacts will only continue to worsen for many other species besides humans and deer.  
  
  Rather than making uninformed and non-scientific challenges to decisions by caring and considerate residents who have wrestled with this issue, those who are seriously interested in protecting the lives of deer in overpopulated settings should put their energies into changing the law that prohibits the most rational solution - trapping and relocating!
  
  Deer overpopulation in this small village is a problem that has been allowed to worsen for decades and, as much as we all might prefer otherwise, it requires a decisive solution.  The Village Trustees now in office were elected on a platform that included a commitment to take that action.  They have a responsibility to their majority constituents to implement the recommendations of the exhaustive and evidence-based work of the village's Deer Remediation Advisory Committee.