Deer vs. Human Health
While the results of an East Hampton Village questionnaire seeking residents’ opinions on deer management are not yet known, the Village Preservation Society of East Hampton, which helped pay for the village’s highly controversial deer sterilization program, has invited the public to a forum today on how deer affect human health. It will be held at 5:30 p.m. at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church’s Hoie Hall, on James Lane.
Scott Campbell, of the county Health Services Department’s Arthropod-borne Disease Program, will speak at the forum, as will Anna-Marie Wellins of Southampton Hospital’s Tick-Borne Disease Resource Center and a representative of the United States Forest Service.
In announcing at the village’s July 5 organizational meeting that a questionnaire would be sent out, Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. had said, “It goes without saying that the over-burgeoning population of deer” in the village presents “a public health hazard, public nuisance, and quality of life issue.” He directed his remarks to Kathy Cunningham, the Village Preservation Society’s director. “We certainly want to work in partnership with the V.P.S.,” he added. It now seems that even the questionnaire is controversial.
Bill Crain, president of the East Hampton Group for Wildlife, which has worked to mobilize opposition to any renewed deer-management effort, called the questionnaire biased and its questions leading.
“It leads people to continued sterilization or the other option, a cull,” he said. “And it doesn’t include an opportunity for residents to express any positive attitudes, such as whether they enjoy watching deer, if they bring wonder and beauty into their life. A lot of people love the deer and want to protect them.” Though the questionnaire offers respondents an opportunity to add comments, “that doesn’t balance the inherent bias of the questionnaire,” he said.
A letter accompanying the questionnaire, which has now been received throughout the village, noted that the village had “wrestled for many years with the growing deer population and its effects on public health, the environment, local ecology, and quality of life,” and went on to say, “The Village wants to continue a deer management program, whether through additional sterilization, culling, or other methods.”
The Village Preservation Society had donated $100,000 toward that effort in 2015, citing tick-borne diseases, the proliferation of deer fences, destruction of landscaping, and deer-vehicle collisions. Going ahead, that year the village hired White Buffalo, a nonprofit organization, to capture, sedate, and sterilize deer by surgery. White Buffalo sterilized 210 deer, most of them does, according to the letter accompanying the questionnaire. The village spent approximately $190,000 on the program.
On Tuesday, Ms. Cunningham said a majority of respondents to its own surveys were in favor of a cull. The society does not advocate a particular method, she said, although its membership had supported sterilization “because we thought it was a midway point between a cull and doing nothing.”
The sterilization program drew criticism from many village residents as well as hunters and animal-rights activists. Sportsmen insisted that they would be able to cull the herd at no cost to the village while providing meat to food pantries, and complained that meat from sterilized deer would be compromised by the sedative administered for surgery.
Animal-rights activists called the program cruel and ineffective, citing what it said were unsanitary conditions during surgery and noting that sedated animals’ were released, at night, into sometimes subfreezing temperatures. At least six of the sterilized does died, some while attempting to birth stillborn fawns, others as a consequence of capture or surgery.