russ_watters said:
You have it backwards: we made their environment much, much safer and better suited for them overall. That's why there is overpopulation.
Precisely! This isn't a case of not wanting any deer in the backyard and complaining because we moved into their space, but that they have completely overpopulated the area. It's not just problems of interactions with people (and their cars or landscaping), but that they're destroying forests and habitat for other animals. If you visit forests in NJ, you'll notice there is very little vegetation growing in a range from the ground level up to about 3-4 ft up, because deer have browsed it all. This is habitat that other ground-dwelling animals use for nesting. Normally, that by itself would have been the end of the deer overpopulation problem, but when they run out of tasty treats in the woods, they just head over to the nicely manicured lawns and landscaping and enjoy the lovely buffet selection which keeps getting replenished. There's also more risk to the deer herd itself long-term. When a population gets that overcrowded, if they do start spreading a disease through the herd, it'll affect a lot of them. Again, while that may ultimately solve the overpopulation problem, it could also easily wipe out far more of the herd as well, so just keeping their numbers down to a sustainable level for the land and their own population is the best approach.
Art said:
Out of interest what were the problems? Presumably as one lead stag mates with ~80% of the herd it's only the herd leaders you need to treat so was the problem developing a slow release hormone to render them temporarily infertile? If so why not make the leaders permanently infertile and allow the 20% to breed?
There's no point at all in targetting males unless you can target 100%. One male can breed a lot of does. If you render 80% of the males infertile, the remaining 20% can still breed every doe in the state. Instead, we were targetting the does, which has the best chance of controlling population in a predictable way...we know each doe has 1-2 fawns in a year, so if you want to slow population growth by a certain percent, you know exactly how many does you'll need to target to do that.
If you read the entirety of my post, you'd see there were multiple problems. One is a reversible drug, another is actually getting it into the deer. You can't just hand out planned parenthood pamphlets to deer...in a captive population, you can dart them, but a frequent problem we noted with the deer captured using dart guns to anesthetize them for shipment is that they develop abcesses at the dart site, so darting isn't really viable if you have no way to bring them back to treat abcesses. All long-term contraceptives in people are administered subcutaneously as injections or implants, so neither of those is viable. In addition, any long-acting hormone would be present in the meat for a long time too, putting anyone or anything that eats the meat at risk. We tried oral dosing with baits spiked with shorter acting drugs, and the problem we had is one deer would find the bait so tasty, it would gobble down all of it, getting an overdose, while the rest would find it completely uninteresting and not get enough. We couldn't reliably get the same animals to return to the bait station every day either. We also couldn't prevent other non-target species from using the bait stations for snacks, and the last thing we want to do is endanger other species that aren't overpopulated. Another issue with oral dosing is that deer are ruminants, so it's really hard to get a drug to survive digestion and be effective. A lot of long-acting, slow-release capsules and compounding used for drugs that people take would not work because of the different stomach environment in deer. Besides, we can't make them take pills. The best we were trying to do was dissolve it into a drink for them, or incorporate it into a salt lick.
Contraceptives for humans are continuously improving and changing too, so I wouldn't say this will never be viable, but with the available compounds at the time, it isn't. We were never looking for 100% efficacy, but it did need to keep at least a portion of the does infertile the entire breeding season, otherwise, all they'd need is one fertile cycle to get pregnant (most deer get pregnant on their first cycle of the season, but if they don't they'll keep mating until they are).
So perhaps a less trivial way of identifying dominant males would be best, such as for example through acoustics - studies have shown the dominant stags are louder than other males unlike the human species wherin the loudest tend to be the most inferior.
and yes I had noticed deers are bigger than mosquitos; conversely there's a lot less of them; and to my knowledge mosquitos also live in the wild.
