As taxpayers, homeowners, visitors, tourists and shoppers; 

As concerned citizens, environmentalists and advocates for wildlife:

We demand that Town/Village Boards of Eastern Long Island:

*Immediately cease and desist from the Long Island Farm Bureau/USDA plan to hire Federal sharp shooters to inhumanely slaughter 5,000 deer in Suffolk County, NY, commencing January/February 2014.
*Immediately institute a humane, sustainable, non-lethal deer management plan based on science, rather than anecdotal, highly charged emotional accounts.

We categorically reject and protest the unethical, "quick-fix", non-science-based plan propagated by the Long Island Farm Bureau and the U.S.D.A. to cruelly slaughter and/or surgically sterilize over 5,000 deer in the five towns of Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, commencing January/February, 2014. Not only does this present an inherent danger to the public, to pets and other wildlife, but it imposes an onerous and unnecessary financial burden on taxpayers.

Deer will be entrapped by bait stations and then shot by sharpshooters under cover of night, from mobile units or tree stands, or captured in drop nets, and then executed at point blank range with a hand-gun. This is grotesque, extraordinarily cruel and utterly unacceptable to civilized people of conscience. The ensuing terror and carnage these animals will suffer is primitive and ethically indefensible. And this, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that immuno-contraception is effective, humane, less expensive and sustainable over the long term.

We demand that this archaic plan be shelved permanently and that intelligent, forward thinking solutions be instituted that protect people, animals and agriculture while adhering to ethical and environmentally sound models.

http://www.sharkonline.org/index.php/animal-cruelty/deer-kills