On Hunting, Laissez-Faire
Valley Forge Park’s Deer Management
We all know these things are complicated, involving many intricacies of ecology, economics, and ethics, and citing the Bible chapter and verse doesn’t prove much except that fallen man has once again made a mess of things. Bullies and cowards are taking out their problems on animals, and some folks will do anything for money, and the general public has lots of other things to worry about, and it’s a crying shame. So what else is new? As General Schwarzkopf asked, “Where don’t you find excess today?”
What’s news is the scope of it, today covering all points of the planet. The people you least want looking after wildlife now have a near-complete monopoly on it. The same kind of money one sees in Reno buying diamonds and giraffe and pachyderms and charitable tax status also buys influence at state wildlife agencies and at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as well. “It’s our mission to serve hunters,” says one state parks official, “much like welfare agencies serve welfare recipients.
The whole natural world is becoming an archipelago of game parks and shooting ranches and outdoor laboratories for the likes of Dr. Deer to test their cutting-edge theories and innovations, with our zoos and biologists left to preserve and protect remnants of the type, all the species now being assembled in a new ark of science.
Conservatives come at the matter from the basic standpoint of freedom, human self-advancement, and what they take to be our Western religious tradition. If anyone is likely to invoke “dominion” by name, it is the conservative. Whatever the issue might be—Wildlife in the way of development, big-game trophy-hunting, treatment of animals raised for food, fur, or other uses—conservatives are wary of any pleas-made made on behalf of the creatures.
In suburban communities, you are always hearing about the deer problem.
The main complaint is the danger they pose to traffic. It is not as if they are irresistibly drawn to busy roads and terrifying cars and lights. If you were a deer you stay as far clear of highways and busy roads as you could, and that is exactly what deer do when left the alternative. The deer are simply looking for food, water and other deer, having been frightened off from somewhere else by trucks and dynamite and bulldozers. Deer spring into busy unfenced roads in flight from hunters—about as a sorry a picture of dominion as one can imagine. A study here in Pennsylvania found that car insurance claims for deer-related accidents increase fivefold during hunting season.
And who are the chief complainers? The developers and the hunters, ever quick to exploit the safety hazards they themselves have caused. When you take and develop land you have to confront the simple fact that it causes the deer to scatter. You, the developer and renter or buyer, are therefore the morally responsible parties, just as you would be if the project left falling-rock hazards near busy roads.
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On Hunting, Valley Forge Park’s Deer Management
But developers don’t want to pay for fences, road-light systems (alerting the deer to approaching cars), or vaccines to prevent fertilization (administered by treated feed or darts), all of which would serve the purpose quite well, and indeed are working already in places where they have been tried such as Gaithersburg, MD. The line from developers is “fences don’t work” as if northern VA’s bionic deer can scale any height.
This is a claim easily refuted by noting how fences somehow seem to work when the aim is to make money by keeping deer captive. The fences at the Velvet and Mustang hunting ranches seem to do the trick. Local political authorities don’t want to foot the bill for fences, road reflector systems, and a more rigorous enforcement of speed limits, and God forbid, not to antagonize developers who contribute generously to their campaigns. It seem cheaper to all parties concerned to just kill the deer. And why not make it fun, too for the sportsmen, who inevitably have begun promoting “the suburban deer bowhunt” In Valley Forge Park.
As it turns out even these managed hunts are problematic: The more deer they kill, the more space and food is left to other deer, yielding over time more deer than before. The females reproduce in greater numbers, a phenomenon known as compensatory reproduction and observed in human populations, too, during wartime. And there are always lies told about the amount of deer population.
The same thing breathed by animals is the same in mankind. Blood sport is “a bottomless pit of cruelest misery.” In something called the species-Soul, “animals have no capacity for individual suffering, existing only as generic beings. It will survive its death and return to his archetypal condition, resuming its nature as the Deer.” Pets with their clearly distinctive traits and personalities, pose a challenge to this generic-being theory. Human dealings with animals do bring out certain traits of personality that would never emerge in their natural state. Whatever traits of personality emerge in an animal through human influence must obviously be traits latent in the creature themselves. We can bestow only training and influence, not the qualities. They are revealed through our contact with a given animal.
The potential must be there, in the nature of each animal. Pets in this way actually draw us closer to the reality of animal life than “beasts of the wild—a transformation vivid to anyone who has ever taken in a stray or feral, and observed the creature slowing shedding the primal fear and voracity of its foreign life. The tame animal is in a sense the most natural of all, displaying qualities hidden within his or her own nature that only human kindness can elicit.
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On Hunting, Valley Forge Park’s Deer Management
Hunters have a taste of gratuitous violence, their own little monogrammed morality, a value-free universe of victimless hunts and killing without costs.
It is the Imperial Self, armed and dangerous. Indeed dominion today is a little like the U.S. Constitution, stretched to cover all kinds of abuses done in its good name. It is the same fundamentally vulgar vision of man that hunters elsewhere so earnestly worry about—man the perpetual victim, man the whiny special pleader, man the all-conquering consumer facing the universe with limitless entitlements and appetites to be met no matter what the costs.
Even when the complaints are legitimate, as with lethal driving hazards to people, there is an utter refusal to accept human culpability, as if the deer were to blame and not the developers. It is as if the whole natural world existed for no other reason than to please the appetites of man, however ignorant, irrational, and reckless. Anything that is there is there to be taken. If it’s in the way, level it. If it dares distract or inconvenience, run it off. If it adds to costs, kill it. It is a vision that looks upon our fellow creatures to find only life as essential appropriation, injury, overpowering what is alien and weaker, suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own form…exploitation.
As a VF Park enthusiast I am repulsed that violence is the leading contender as an answer to the deer problem. I vote for the option that is humane for the deer, and that Valley Forge Park put in road reflector systems, and a more rigorous enforcement of speed limits and yes, have the humanity to test deer contraception . And as to the deforestation issue, I am a gardener and my own experience is that whatever the deer eats, the plant still grows back. Please do not kill any of the deer. I know hunting is big business, but please be humane and just don’t do it. I am most passionate about this issue and will continue to fight for the deer.
My statement is from information I culled from
Dominion - The Power of Man, The Suffering of Animals and The Call to Mercy by Matthew Scully
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