There are a lot of deer in Pittsburgh.
One can scarcely avoid them these days. They prance on pavement and gravel paths alike, across lawns and flowerbeds, slipping through concertina wire brush and over wire fences. In their wake, they leave crumbling hillsides and headless tulips, yet, one cannot help but be struck by their elegance and gracefulness (some might even call them “demure”). One feels no small degree of sadness at the sight of their ribs poking out from beneath their russet coats, or the sores that pockmark their bony haunches.
Those of you who frequent any of Pittsburgh’s many wonderful parks may have noticed the recent posting of signs announcing a cull of city’s large white-tailed deer population. From September 21 to December 14, and from December 26 through January 26, fifty well-vetted bow hunters are permitted to hunt deer in five Pittsburgh city parks, including Schenley, Frick, Highland, Emerald View, and Riverview.
Last year, a similar program was run only in Frick and Riverview Park, and resulted in the culling of 108 deer. Over half of the meat harvested from the deer was donated to local food banks. But city officials have said that the cull was not enough — and researchers agree, meaning that additional, more expansive culls are necessary.
Lacking any natural predators, the deer population in Pittsburgh has exploded, posing significant problems both to residents, the local environment, and to the deer themselves. Deer decimate native vegetation, contributing to soil erosion and a loss of biodiversity, and according to researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, the number of deer per square mile in Frick Park is currently over five times the carrying capacity. There are simply too many deer for the land to support, the result being that many deer are practically starving. Deer also cause frequent and dangerous vehicle collisions (over 50,000 per year in PA alone), and the scarcity of resources for the swelling deer population means that most deer are under significant physical distress — which, combined with overcrowding, results in increased disease prevalence.
One phenomenon that has been especially jarring to me, as a frequent runner through Schenley Park, is their utter absence of any natural fear of humans. Even when I run towards them at considerable speed (or so I’d like to think: a bystander once warned his children to “watch out for the jogger”, and I fear that my ego still hasn’t recovered), they merely turn their heads to follow me as I pass, as unperturbed as a Yinzer watching a Hunt’s Ketchup bottle shatter on the floor. As we learned all too well from recent events, the risk of a disease jumping from animals to humans under this combination of circumstances is all too real.
But even as I recognize the necessity of the cull — absent the return of panthers to Panther Hollow, that is — I feel no small amount of sympathy, perhaps even pity, for the deer. The other night, I was walking my dog — at least half a mile away from Schenley Park — and all of the sudden, I found myself face to face with a mother doe and two fawns. Quiet and slender, they truly are stealthy creatures. The doe stared at me with gentle eyes, debating whether to flee, and I looked back. It is hard to think about killing something once you’ve looked it in the eyes. The bucks, too, are truly impressive displays of nature’s majesty. They really are quite big, something especially noticeable when seen in comparison to my fifty pound collie.
Though we may consume more meat than ever, we are also more alienated from the meat production process than ever. We no longer have to look our dinner in the eyes. Pampered, industrialized cowards as we so apparently are, we pick up our meat in discrete, disembodied, plastic-wrapped packages. We’d rather not consider the factory farms where our poultry and pork is slaughtered en masse.
Those I have always found to be the most strange are those that take issue with hunters, those that are outraged and horrified at the notion of killing an animal like a deer, but have little problem with purchasing meat at the supermarket. To me, it is infinitely more humane to take the life of a deer living in a park than to factory farm an animal. The deer has only a moment of human-caused suffering; the livestock animal must endure a lifetime of suffering.
Yet still, there is that persistent impulse to not want to hurt what appears as such a delicate animal, the impulse to just leave nature alone. The fawn (Bambi, for Christ’s sake!) is the very archetype of vulnerability. One cannot help but feel bad that they will come to such a violent end — an end necessitated not by any actions of the deer, but in fact of humans.
For, deer overpopulation is hardly “natural”, but rather a consequence of humans removing natural predators that once kept deer populations in check. It’s uncomfortable to consider the “dirty work” that must be done in order to keep society functioning properly, and this is a rare case in which we must so directly confront these realities. The cull is the price we pay for decades of ecological mismanagement.
It’s funny, I often remark that I can tell when someone doesn’t spend much time in the park if I see them photographing the deer. To anyone that spends much time on the Panther Hollow trails, they are hardly more common than a jogger or a stroller. I still hope that the occasional deer runs across my path, but it would be better that they learn to fear humans again. It would be better that deer become once again a photograph-worthy sighting, and no longer blend into the urban landscape like so many street lights and fire hydrants.
I hope that this necessary cull proceeds humanely and that the deer population is brought back under control. We ought not to shy away from confronting the uncomfortable but necessary business of fixing that which we have broken. Life will be better for those deer that remain. Good hunting.
