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A deer massacre took place over two nights, January 7th and 13th, at a 530-acre farm preserve owned by Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. White Buffalo, Inc., a company of “sharpshooters” hired by Vassar, slaughtered sixty-four deer.

In order to make it easier to lure the deer, they were conditioned with food over a period of several weeks. After gaining their trust, they were shot at night as they returned to the area looking for food. Use of lights, known as deer jacking, was also allowed. Deer jacking involves shining a spotlight on a deer at night, temporarily “freezing” him or her in place (think deer in the headlights), making them an easy target for hunters.

After the first night of killing when 44 deer were killed, Vassar College President Catharine Bond Hill was asked by a local grassroots organization to put an end to the slaughter. President Hill refused, and 20 more deer were killed. This was the first leg of the Vassar-lethal deer management program by which the college plans to kill a total of 85 deer, reducing the population on the preserve from 100 down to 15.

Vassar took its cue from the deer curtailment protocols of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC), which advises that shooting deer is the best method for dealing with deer population control. Vassar was granted a permit by the NYSDEC to kill a maximum of 50 deer but it was revised to allow the college to take more. Vassar claims it investigated non-lethal deer management programs, such as fencing, fertility control, and relocation but opted instead to hire the sharpshooters.

The elite college claims the kill was “humane,” but White Buffalo was exposed in 2004 for placing plastic bags over the heads of deer who were shot but still alive during a cull in Akron, OH. Undercover video footage caught by the group SHARK shows deer flailing in distress for minutes after being shot.

Vassar’s intent was to finish the kill before students and faculty returned to campus from winter break, on January 20th, thereby avoiding public notice and eliminating the chance of any protest from taking place. The school claims it held public meetings informing students and the general public about the kill, but many citizens have complained that they were not notified and had no voice in the proceedings. The student newspaper, The Miscellany News, supposedly informed the students about the kill but was overwhelmingly biased in an article published on December 9th, the day classes ended. The study period started the next day and was followed by exams and the holiday season. Considering there was so little opposition to the deer kill on campus, it seems a near certainty that students were not aware of what it was all about.

Nevertheless, a grassroots group, SaveOurDeer, was formed in response to the killing. Composed of Vassar College students and members of the local community, the group has appealed to Vassar to end the kill in favor of non-lethal measures, but the college refused to consider them. SaveOurDeer has held two protests thus far, one of which was attended by more than 60 people.

Vassar paid at least $10,000 to hire White Buffalo to kill the deer. An initial estimate of $25,000 was presented to Vassar, which it was willing to pay, but that fee was reduced to between $8,000 and $10,000 “due to a change in scope of the operation and site details,” according to Vassar’s Web site.

Our question to Vassar: why not appropriate this money toward a program of deer fertility control using immunocontraception?
As an academic institution, Vassar is in a perfect position to utilize its faculty and student resources to implement a program of deer contraception. The funds used to hire sharpshooters should instead be applied towards a non-lethal program of deer population control. It is time to stop reverting to killing because it is the easy and unthinking thing to do.

Click here to send an e-mail to Vassar College’s President to protest the deer kill.

I attended a meeting last Thursday, November 12, that was set up to explain to county residents why this slaughter is necessary. It seems we have lost biodiversity and now we must kill the deer to regain it.Here’s how it works. Once upon a time, before 1800, we lived in an idyllic landscape consisting of approximately 15 deer per square mile. Then the human species got busy, clear cutting the forests and killing predatory species like wolves and coyotes. Deer, too, were virtually wiped out by 1850.

But when all the farmers who had clear cut the lands started moving west, the forests returned. Some people decided it would be good to reintroduce the deer. So with no human or animal predators and the forests a-flourishing, the deer proliferated.

Now, however, we must kill them for decimating the forest floor, along with Mrs. Smith’s tulips. You see, even though humans have turned the entire ecosystem on its head, we are indignant that we can’t enjoy all the same plant species that were here 100 years ago. That’s where the biodiversity part comes in. Our forests don’t look like we want them to. So in order to restore biodiversity, we must kill deer to return their population to that elusive 15 per square mile (even though there is some belief that it is below this number in many areas of Westchester) and, in so doing, we will reverse all the turmoil that has resulted from our housing developments, golf courses, strip malls, and decimation of a bevy of larger species.

Some people are not buying this argument. We question how a plan for single species management can possibly offset all the other variables that have already been tampered with in the environment. One panel speaker, a representative from the Humane Society of the U.S., offered a refreshing opposition to killing deer, and pointed out that our forest floor may look different today because forests go through stages. Old growth forests have a dense canopy with little light that doesn’t permit the kind of ground cover we think we should have. In other words, the natural world we covet may in fact be more fiction than fact.

It turns out that killing deer as a management solution is not without its problems. For one thing, there is a demonstrated rebound effect whereby deer fertility will balloon in response to decline in species numbers. In a short time, we will be back where we started. That’s the thing about nature. It really was set up to keep things in order, despite human intervention.

Worse still, with an average population density of 2,134 human inhabitants per square mile, Westchester County, it turns out, is a poor choice for hunting of any sort.  Our public officials acknowledge that, yet they also quickly dismissed non-lethal forms of deer management. Can they really believe that biodiversity will return at the expense of rationality?

Westchester County is not alone. Scores of communities throughout the U.S. are dealing with the new face of suburban hunting. As human populations grow, and as deer are forced to live in increasingly limited habitat, deer-human conflicts will rise. But killing deer with guns or arrows doesn’t work in the long run, and is hardly a viable option in areas of high human population. To think that killing deer in our county parks will restore forest biodiversity is a fairy tale. We need real world solutions, and we need to develop ways to co-exist with nature in an increasingly modified world.

This is the new face of human-wildlife interactions that will only increase as we go forward. IDA’s plea is for a sane plan that respects and tolerates the natural world, including its nonhuman inhabitants. This is our challenge—indeed it is our mandate, and with the help of compassionate people everywhere, we will work to get it accomplished.