Opinions

A plea to consider: evaluating the cull

Immunocontraceptives represent a moral alternative to the upcoming cull of the Crum deer

In print | November 20, 2008

Ever since I decided to take a gap year and defer my acceptance at Swarthmore College, I have made a point of following campus news online in order to maintain a sense of connection with the college. Over time, I’ve begun to take the school’s evident spirit of justice, awareness and activism (in the words of President Al Bloom, its “ethical intelligence”) for granted. I was therefore alarmed and caught off guard when I learned of the college’s decision to hire a sharpshooter to manage the Crum Woods deer population.

Killing over 20 deer per square mile of forest seemed far out of line with my own sense of morality, but I did recognize the “profound” threat that the deer posed to the balance of the Crum Woods ecosystem, and I knew that it needed to be addressed. Moreover, I knew how important the woods were both to the college and to the inhabitants of the surrounding communities. So I decided to investigate, in an effort to understand the full scope of this issue and why the College had ruled out the non-lethal alternatives. I read the entire report issued by Natural Resource Consultants Incorporated (NRC), I read all of the announcements, articles and FAQ posted on the Swarthmore College website and printed in the student publications, I watched the video of the 2007 community meeting and I conducted ample research of my own.

My concern was that the deer were not getting the moral consideration they deserved, for no better reason than that they were animals and that their interests apparently conflicted with our own. To avoid this mindset myself, I tried to consider the management options from the point of view of the deer. Relatively speaking, a bullet to the brain is just about the most “humane” way to kill a man, but the profound impact that the death of an individual can have upon the lives of his family and friends prevents any death sentence from ever being genuinely humane.

Analogously, the murder of the adult, female deer that the sharpshooters would have to target in order to have any effect won’t just leave the rest of the herd ignorantly content: it will result in the abandonment of the 40% of the population that are still fawns, the 40% that counted on spending the first 1-2 years of their lives with their mothers but suddenly found themselves alone and uncared for.
In order for the college to reject the non-lethal alternatives to sharpshooting, these options would need to have drawbacks at least equivalent to the sum total of this great loss of sentient life and the suffering that it would leave in its wake.

Yet my research only confirmed my suspicions, yielding contraception as a viable, conscionable alternative with minimal drawbacks.

According to the NRC report, “The small home range size and strong site fidelity of urban female deer suggest localized management using immunocontraception is theoretically possible in suburban communities, and immunocontraceptive vaccines offer significant promise for wildlife management (Turner and Kirkpatrick 1991, Kilpatrick et al 1997, Warren et al 1997 and Kirkpatrick et al. 2001).”

The most serious problems cited are that GonaCon, one of the leading immunocontraceptives, is currently only available on an experimental basis and that population reduction by attrition is slow. But, both in his official report and in his lecture at the 2007 community meeting, Bryon Schlisser of NRC, Inc. repeatedly stated that GonaCon had a strong chance of being approved for commercial use in the very near future, and he praised it as a tool that would prove highly useful in the management of wildlife populations.

More notably, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has documented in writing their belief that GonaCon will be available in as few as six months from now.

If the college has already taken over five years to act upon the deer situation, surely another six-month delay cannot constitute a justification for mass killing.

More to the point, the Crum Woods, as a whole, are not yet in a critical condition. Multiple times in his 2007 lecture, Schlisser commented that Swarthmore College had decided to take up deer management at a much earlier stage than most of his other clients do. Confident in the fundamental health of the forest, he went on to say, “I think you’ll find recovery here may be very quick.“ The 2003 National Lands Trust (NLT) report confirms that, “The deer population in the Crum Woods is not at levels seen in other parts of the region, but … deer are impacting the long-term health of the forest.” Perhaps sharpshooting would deserve serious consideration if the Crum Woods ecosystem was more imminently threatened, but we’re just not at that point.

Contraception could admittedly take up to a decade to produce results, but, if fencing and various mitigation and restoration techniques are needed to aid specific floral species in the interim, then so be it. The fact remains that sharpshooting is unnecessary, unwarranted and unscrupulous, and I do not see how an institution as forward-thinking and upstanding as Swarthmore College could endorse it.

In the end, there is some chance that contraception and other non-lethal ancillary measures will collectively fail.

There is some chance that lethal means will prove the only solution to the deer problem. But the NRC report acknowledges that there is also some chance that sharpshooting will fail (especially if the college decides to substitute cheap, newly trained hunters for the professional sharpshooting contractors who charge hundreds of dollars per deer killed). The reality is that no one knows for sure which techniques will work and which ones will not.

But we do know that contraception will allow the deer to live out their full lives in peace, while sharpshooting will cut dozens of lives short and leave many others in the lurch. It is our moral obligation to make an honest effort to employ immunocontraceptive vaccines in the Crum Woods before we resign ourselves to this ghastly cull.

I truly appreciate the time that you have taken to read and consider this important letter. It’s not too late to rethink and reverse this unethical decision, but the clock is ticking.