(Jon Margolis writes political columns for VTDigger.)
[W]ant to reduce your carbon footprint? Are you interested in eating healthy food produced locally and naturally without artificial herbicides, pesticides or chemical fertilizer?
Try hunting. Venison is leaner than that marbled hunk of beef you’re likely to buy at the supermarket. The deer you shoot was not penned up in a feedlot, and the meat was not trucked from hundreds of miles away.
“Everything the localvore movement is about, hunting is about,” said Louis Porter, Vermont’s commissioner of fish and wildlife. “There’s no healthier food than wild game.”
And now is the time. The deer – perhaps 145,000 of them, according to Fish and Wildlife Department estimates – are in the woods and may be hunted with rifles until Sunday.
There’s a reason Porter and other hunting advocates are making this link between hunting and the environmentally conscious local-and-healthy-food fad. They’re looking for any hook they can find to get more people to hunt. In Vermont and elsewhere, there are many fewer hunters than there used to be, which creates problems.
Not just for wildlife managers, either. It creates problems for deer, and for the rest of the natural world.
Catamounts and wolves having been extirpated from these parts some time ago, the only effective deer predators left are human hunters. If there are too few of them, there are likely to be too many deer. Though the Vermont deer herd right now seems healthy, in some parts of the state there are so many deer they have become pests.
“In Montpelier we get a lot of complaints about the deer population doing damage to gardens,” Porter said.
People love deer. No wonder. Deer are beautiful and graceful, and their faces (at least of the fawns and does) make them appear sweet and gentle, almost like overgrown kittens.
Then there is the Bambi effect, the impact of the 1942 Disney animated film based on a 1923 novel written in German.
(Trivia quiz: Who translated the novel into English? Hint: He needed the money because his day job as editor of the Communist newspaper The Daily Worker did not pay well. Answer is below.)
Though the movie was both a critical and box-office flop at first, ultimately it became a classic and convinced generations of Americans that deer are smart, lovable, gentle creatures.
They are in fact flea- and tick-infested, ornery wild animals. They are also, said Mark Scott, the director of the Wildlife Division in Porter’s department, “our most destructive animal.” Deer, Scott said, eat plants and woody material, posing a potential threat to farms and forests. “If deer densities are too high, it can have a tremendous impact on the ecology of the state,” he said.
Deer densities can get too high if hunter density gets too low. Though coyotes and bobcats can and do take sick or crippled deer, without enough hunters to kill thousands of adult deer every year, the deer population could expand beyond the capacity of the habitat. The likely consequence – lots of underfed, scrawny, feeble deer – benefits no one, including the deer.
In 2015 (the latest available count), 57,502 Vermonters got hunting licenses. That was fewer than in 2014, which was fewer than in 2013, which was … well, the trend is clear. And the long-term decline is dramatic. In 1970, when there were 445,000 Vermonters, more than 107,000 of them bought hunting licenses. That’s about 24 percent. Now it’s more like 9 percent.
Porter said the raw numbers overstate the decline because some Vermonters have permanent hunting licenses that don’t have to be renewed every year. But he acknowledged there has been “a slow and steady decline in hunting participation,” consistent with the demographics of an aging population (of humans, not deer).
“Hunting is something you can age out of,” he said. “Between 55 and 65 a lot of folks start hanging up the rifles.”
The drop in the number of hunters is neither new nor unique to Vermont. In September, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released a study showing there were 2.2 million fewer hunters nationwide than in 2011.
To control the herd, the Fish and Wildlife Department is trying both to get more people to hunt and to get each hunter to harvest more deer. The archery season is longer. Hunters older than 50, who might have a hard time bending that bow, may now use crossbows. And officials are thinking about allowing more hunting of female deer.
Statewide, Vermont does not now have a deer overpopulation problem. In fact, Porter said, there are areas that are “not reaching deer capacity,” including parts of the Northeast Kingdom, where he said a decline in logging had reduced the deer population. Scott agreed, noting that only 2 or 3 percent of Vermont could be classified as “young forest,” where growth provides deer with “a real dinner table.”
So it seems, and so it illustrates how unnatural the natural world has become, or at least how human beings have industrialized, centralized, standardized and systematized that world.
Deer and trees are natural. If no human ever cut down a tree, there would be deer in the forest. But fewer, because there would be fewer of those young trees replacing the ones recently logged.
So the industrialization of the forest helps raise the deer population to a level that might be unnatural but is desirable because hunting is part of the human culture, and humans – or at least enough of them with enough political clout – want the deer herd managed (or systematized) for their benefit.
And all this came after Vermont humans first industrialized and systematized the natural world enough to wipe out the deer. Then, in 1878, in an equally centralized and systematized manner (it was, after all, the government), they restocked the state by bringing 17 white-tailed deer from New York, after which they carefully and scientifically managed the herd.
Now one of the challenges for wildlife managers is to persuade some folks who did not grow up in a hunting culture to take up the pastime. In other words, the managers have to engage in marketing, surely a form of systemization.
And a tough task, as Porter acknowledged. Not only do new hunters have to take a hunting safety course, they have to steel themselves “to pull the trigger on another animal, a beautiful animal.”
Even in an industrialized, standardized age, nature endures.
(Trivia quiz answer: Whittaker Chambers, the Communist turned anti-Communist crusader and conservative idol)
