Carlisle’s Board of Selectmen is considering a Deer Committee proposal to expand the bow-hunt for deer on town land in 2020. Because the 2018 and 2019 hunts failed to kill many deer, the Deer Committee wants to add additional blocks of public land, increase the number of hunters by almost 100%, and extend the season by another month, thereby taking over public land for a quarter of the year.

The Selectmen’s stated purpose for these hunts is to protect town forests from damage due to deer overpopulation. However, no scientifically rigorous study has been done that establishes that Carlisle has a forest health problem.

Whether or not there is a problem, deer population experts, such as Dr. Allen Rutberg of Tufts University, state that serious deer problems cannot be solved by bow-hunting on public  lands in suburban areas and that archery hunts on these lands are recreational. Hunting of all forms has failed to control the deer population state-wide in Massachusetts in the 57 years between 1961 and 2018. Deer killed by hunters during that time increased by a factor of four, but the herd continued to grow, mostly in suburban Eastern Massachusetts, because residential plantings provide large amounts of deer food, allowing the deer to reproduce rapidly. 

Carlisle therefore has an unproven problem being addressed by a method that will not work that prevents people concerned about their safety from using the trails on the public lands being hunted. It is, according to multiple experts, a recreational hunt, and so we are sacrificing access to these public lands for no reason other than to benefit hunters, only half of whom were Carlisle residents in the 2018 and 2019 hunts, dropping to 21% if the Selectmen approve the expanded hunt..

Please join us in asking the Carlisle Selectmen to suspend the hunt for at least a year and re-think their approach by

• Becoming more familiar with the basic science of deer population management.
• Authorizing periodic rigorous studies of our forest health. This will both establish definitively whether a problem exists, and if it does, provide a necessary metric for evaluating the effectiveness of any mitigation measures. This is currently not being done.
• Educating the town about  the importance of not planting favorite deer foods, removing those they may already have planted,  and not feeding deer.
• Establishing a formal relationship with the Tufts deer contraception program, which demonstrated its effectiveness and is making good progress toward economic practicality.

For more information about this issue, including why the expanded hunt will still not solve the “problem”, please see https://tlhunt.herokuapp.com