Thin 'em out
Aegis editorial
Posted 12/01/10
Last autumn in Maryland, deer hunters took home a record 100,663 deer, up slightly from the previous year’s record of 100,437 killed in the previous season.
And still, there are too many deer.
In a way, it’s a good problem to have. It wasn’t that many decades ago that seeing a deer in Harford County (other than on Aberdeen Proving Ground) was a rarity on the order of what seeing a bear in these parts is today. The re-establishment of the deer population in Maryland is a testament to the effectiveness of sound wildlife management.
And the sport hunting community played a substantial role in lobbying for the kind of wildlife management that brought the deer back.
So now we’re in the midst of what hunters call the regular firearms season for deer, the two weeks during which the most deer are killed each year, and we can probably expect another record take.
It still won’t be enough. Deer will continue to destroy crops and residential gardens, and they’ll still pose a potentially deadly threat on our roadways. Meanwhile, there remains a conspicuous lack of the natural deer predators — timber wolves and cougars — in this area.
A few years back, the regular firearms season for deer was extended from one week to two in an effort to further thin out the herd. Maybe its time to consider another extension, or even a midwinter deer season that would fall in January or February, for purposes of increasing the annual deer take.
One thing is for sure, though, having too many deer is a problem that needs to be addressed, the most effective way of thinning the herd is managed hunting.