Solon Deer - A First-hand Account

I wrote a while ago about the Solon deer problem. This ballot issue is going to come up for a vote in a few weeks as issue 94.As time has passed I’m becoming a lot more opinionated about this issue.The main arguments against allowing any form of hunting is the fear of people with guns or bows used to kill the deer. The more important thing however is the Bambi factor -- they’re cute and they should be kept around.The hunting issue is an interesting one though. It goes so far to prevent the city itself from contracting with professional culling services.The other side of this is the overpopulation of deer in Solon. This comes in several different forms. The most obvious is the health aspects to the deer themselves. An overpopulation of deer leads to them contracting chronic wasting disease (CWD) which causes a slow death and makes them useless for any food use.Beyond that there is the issue to the environment: lack of food causes them to start behaving strangely and eat things like bark and mildly poisonous plants. Moving beyond that they are a menace to vehicle traffic -- the accident count in Solon is correlated with the deer population. Lastly there’s the issue that most people seem to care about most: destruction to landscaping.En has some plants like nightshade that are poisonous in our yard. They’ve been chosen because deer don’t eat it. There are ways around the landscaping issue for the most part.This took another turn for me over the weekend.The deer are so hungry they ate my antenna feedline! LMR-400 has no nutritive value at all!How do I figure it's deer? Simple: it's deer head height and there's nothing else in the area that would start to do this. The extra loops of cable were around 3 1/2 feet up off the ground. The other possible attackers would be something like coyotes or dogs, but the size of the teeth marks would tent to rule them out -- even if they could reach it in the first place.While fixing it our neighbor came out to see what’s up. (Not surprising -- sitting in the woods with a mini torch soldering isn’t something that most people think about. Talking to her made it really clear to me that people aren’t seeing the issue for what it is.“Can’t we just get them to go somewhere else?”This reminds me of those newspaper editorials where people are asking to move the deer crossing signs because it’s not safe for the deer to cross where they’re posted. You can’t reason with deer. You can’t ask them to just go somewhere else. You can’t force them to go somewhere else. Contraceptives have been shown to be not a good value-for-money since it requires constant attention and reapplication.Since we, as humans, have gotten rid of all the large predators they’re prey have gone out of control. We are responsible to be the stewards of the environment that we ourselves have messed up.Honestly I wonder how many of the antis enjoy a good burger or wear leather shoes? Neither grow on trees.[smugmug url="http://photos.vec.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=gallery&Data=19704086_SXXgjC&format=rss200" imagecount="100" start="1" num="100" thumbsize="Th" link="lightbox" captions="false" sort="false" window="true" smugmug="true" size="L"]