So there's a deer hunt on in NJ because they're becomming something of a public nuisance. Here are some comments in the Times and my responses.

But to Carol Rivielle, a retired schoolteacher who has been fighting plans for the cull for eight years, it is “a barbaric slaughter of our animals.” Mrs. Rivielle’s 135-member group, Save Our Wildlife, has protested twice at the reservation since January as “a voice for the deer that have no voice,” she said. “It is sickening, the thought of these beautiful deer being hunted down in this way.”

The thought may be sickening, but the taste is so delicious that I'm willing to overlook the thought. I'm sure the people in the soup kitchens dining on venison don't mind too much either.

Instead of killing animals, Mrs. Rivielle said, the county should install more roadside reflectors to deter deer and try experimental contraception that will soon be on the market. But Mr. DiVincenzo said that road reflectors were unreliable, and that the county had tried to trap and transfer deer but “they died on the way, and that was very inhumane.” As for deer contraception, he said, it is too expensive and “doesn’t work here because this is an uncontrolled, free-ranging population.”

Contraceptives? For deer? Say what? I'm not really sure that a team of scientists running around trying to get deer to essentially promise to use condoms every time is really going to do much. I just thought about this idea again and my brain hurt even more. And again.

Labels: local