Griffin: A smart way to control deer population

In Hastings-on-Hudson, gardening enthusiasts arrived at a village meeting ready to hire someone to cull a local herd of deer. Residents were frustrated with the animals devouring their plants and the understory of a patch of forest saved from development.

The particular method under discussion was net and bolt; a deer drawn to bait is captured in a net, where he thrashes, sometimes breaking antlers and legs, until a person wielding the same kind of gun used in slaughterhouses manages to shoot a bolt through his brain.

After considering the backlash from concerned residents, the village reconsidered. Instead, it has become a proving ground for one of two nonlethal techniques for managing deer numbers: PZP, a contraceptive vaccine that can be delivered through a dart. The method has been effective on Fripp Island, S.C., and at the Maryland campus of the federal National Institute of Standards and Technology, but has never been tried in an open community like Hastings-on-Hudson. The experiment got off to a slow start this past winter, delayed by waits for state permits, but Tufts University professor Allen Rutberg, one of the leading experts on PZP, says it could lead to many other communities adopting the same approach.

"If it does work there, it probably . . . will work in a lot of other places," said Rutberg, in a recent article in All Animals, the magazine of The Humane Society of the United States.

A second nonlethal technique ready for widespread adoption is being tried out in suburban Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and in communities in California. Does are being sterilized, their ovaries removed in a 30-minute procedure perfected by veterinarian Steve Timm of Wisconsin, working with wildlife biologist Anthony DeNicola of Connecticut, a sharpshooter who owns a business that until recently specialized in culling deer.

As with deer treated with PZP, sterilized animals are returned to the woods where they occupy territory, adding no new fawns to the population and keeping outside deer from moving in. One additional benefit is that, unlike PZP, where females have to be retreated every two to three years to remain infertile, sterilization is permanent.

Today, even if communities can tolerate the bloodshed, it's impossible to eliminate a population of deer. Lethal means must be repeated again and again, every year. Even then, unless a very high percentage of deer are killed, culling doesn't reduce deer populations.

The 21st-century alternatives of PZP and sterilization do. These techniques can cost less than $500 per animal when nonprofit organizations and volunteer groups donate time and resources to the effort. Unlike a cull, they aren't followed by a surge in deer numbers as the population rebounds. Right now, they are being offered to communities on eastern Long Island, where plans for the federal Wildlife Services to shoot thousands of deer were abandoned by several communities due to public outrage and the threat of lawsuits. They're also being offered to the National Park Service for use in Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C., where wildlife services sharpshooters have killed deer for two winters.

Which humane technique communities and governments use will be determined on a case-by-case basis, but either has one unarguable effect: They save a lot of lives.

Stephanie Boyles Griffin is senior director of innovative wildlife management program for the Humane Society of the United States.