Tag: Deer

The Denouement to the Princeton Deer Hunt

For the past couple years there’s been on ongoing controversy over attempts by Princeton Township (New Jersey) to reduce the size of the deer herd. Princeton has brought in sharpshooters in the past, endured failed lawsuits trying to stop it from carrying out the deer cull, and generally been the focus of the ongoing debate about dealing with deer in urban and suburban areas.

The whole episode took another interesting turn in January when one of the opponents of the Princeton hunting plans switched sides, much to the consternation of animal rights activists who complained they had been betrayed.

A group called Hunters Advocate had opposed the plan to kill the deer with sharpshooters and captive-bolt guns. Led by Robert Kubiak, Hunters Advocate had worked along side animal rights groups such as the League of Animal Protection Voters to oppose the sharpshooters.

But in January, Kubiak’s attorney Falk Engel presented a plan to the Princeton Township board to replace the sharpshooters and captive-bolt guns with a program of coordinated bow hunting. Princeton Township largely rejected Kubiak’s proposal — it will continue to seek sharpshooters and captive-bolt gun methods — but it did modify its plan to address complaints from hunters who felt the previous plan unfairly denied them the ability to hunt game.

Under the revised plan, Princeton Township agreed not to cull deer on any private lands that are under contract with hunting clubs. The revised plan also agreed to work with hunters to investigate opening up some public lands for private hunters during the 2003-2004 hunting season.

Stuart Chaifetz of the League of Animal Protection Voters was outraged at Kubiak’s sudden about-face. In an e-mail posted to an animal rights e-mail list, Chaifetz cited comments by Kubiak in support of bow hunting and wrote,

What we have here is a textbook case of how compromise, working with the enemy and an unwillingness to take a hard stand for the animals leads to the bloody destruction of those animals. It is a shameful thing that should never have been allowed to happen. Any of you who attended the “celebration” fund raisers at Princeton, which may have funded this man, should demand your money back.

In the last few years there has been a rush to the “center” in the fight for wiild [sic] animals. By this I mean taking a non-offensive stance (because we just can’t afford to offend anyone) and compromise on issues (because we just can’t be seen as being radical animal rights activists).

. . .

This is a cautionary tale: Move closer to the enemy, join with the enemy, and sleep with the enemy, and when you wake up you will find that you have become the enemy.

Similarly, Angi Metler of the New Jersey Animal Rights Alliance told The Princeton Packet,

We are appalled and will not be party to any collaboration between hunters and attorneys calling for anyone to kill deer in Princeton or anywhere else.

The activists were likely even further appalled when the state Fish and Game Council approved the revised plan in a 7-2 vote — it had previously rejected other plans put forward by the Township. Of course by that time, Kubiak had once again switched sides and was voicing his opposition to the deer cull saying there was no justification for continuing the program.

Stay tuned for the exciting next episode in the Princeton Township deer cull saga. This is likely to be a stewing issue for years.

Sources:

Animal-rights advocates slam bow-hunting proposal. David Campbell, The Princeton Packet, January 31, 2003.

Princeton deer betrayed by lawyer. Stuart Chaifetz, e-mail, January 29, 2003.

Princeton Township stands firm on deer-plan removal. David Campbell, The Princeton Packet, January 28, 2003.

Animal-rights group fights deer plan on the airwaves. Gwen Runkle, The Princeton Packet, February 11, 2003.

Game council drops opposition to Princeton deer control plan. Newsday, February 16, 2003.

Princeton Township Ban on Feeding Deer Upheld

A Superior Court judge this week upheld a Princeton Township ordinance that foribds property owners from feeding deer.

Princeton Township’s efforts to manage its deer population have attracted animal rights attention after the township brought in marksman to thin the deer herd.

The township also passed an ordinance forbidding peopel to feed deer on their property, whcih brought a legal challenge from the New Jersey Animal Rights Alliance and 30 other groups and individuals who argued the ordinance was arbitrary and unreasonable.

Judge Linda Feinberg agreed with the township that,

Put simply, the artificial feeding is causing exactly the effects the township is trying to combat, namely, that the deer are concentrating on properties in alarmingly high numbers resulting in a deterimental imapct on the environment and neighboring propertis.

Plaintiffs attorney Bruce Afran told The Princeton Packet that the plaintiffs would appeal the decision saying it violated the rights of property owners and that the township had not sufficiently proven that deer feeding posted a real threat to the environment and people of Princeton Township.

Sources:

Township’s deer-feeding ban upheld by court. David Campbell, The Princeton Packet, December 13, 2002.

Ban on feeding deer upheld. Robert Stern, The Times (New Jersey), December 13, 2002.

Feed deer, get fined in NJ,. Associated Press, December 13, 2002.

Is Alberta Being Hypocritical about Canned Hunts?

A few weeks ago I wrote about the decision by the Alberta government not to allow canned hunts at private game farms (see Alberta Premier Outlines the Horrors of Canned Hunts). Alberta premier Ralph Klein said that shooting animals in confined, penned-in areas was “abhorrent.” Game farmers in Alberta now want to know why, if canned hunts are really so horrible, the government itself is engaged in the practice.

Serge Buy of the Canadian Cervid Council, which represents elk and deer ranchers, told the Edmonton Journal that Alberta currently sells hunting licenses so that people can shoot elk on fenced-in land own by the province.

The government responded that the difference is a matter of size — elk hunted at the Cooking Lake-Blackfoot Provincial Recreation area, for example, have 97 square kilometers to roam compared to game farms which are as small as just 100 hectares (roughly .6 square kilometers).

Source:

Elk ranchers renew debate over hunt farms: Province accused of contradictory policy. Dennis Hryciuk, The Edmonton Journal, September 7, 2002.

Alberta Premier Outlines the Horrors of Canned Hunts

After a meeting of a government caucus to consider the issue, Alberta Premier Ralph Klein announced that deer and elk game farms in Alberta would not be allowed to offer hunters the opportunity to shoot the game. Deer and elk game farms are struggling financially, and had hoped opening up their facilities to hunters might make them profitable.

Like all arguments against canned hunts, Klein fell back on some vague metaphysical view of hunting that requires some poorly defined amount of fairness in order to be legitimate. According to Klein,

To go to a hunt farm and shoot a penned-up animal, an animal that doesn’t have a chance, I think it’s abhorrent. . . . I think it’s abhorrent to take wild animals and have them penned up and available to hunters who don’t want to take the time to go out into the wild.

Good for Klein. If he allows canned hunts, what’s next? Someone will come along with the audacity to suggest outright domestication of animals and all of a sudden Alberta would be burdened by the horrors of settled animal agriculture. Chickens, cows and other animals would be held by farmers and just marched off to slaughterhouses without even a chance at escape. How sporting would that be?

If Klein is a vegan and plans next to dismantle all animal agriculture in Alberta, then he is wrongheaded but at least principled. More likely, however, Klein is here engaging in a common hypocrisy that places the hunting of deer and elk in enclosed environments on a different moral plane than raising cattle destined for the slaughterhouse. There is no justification at all for this sort of silly distinction.

Source:

Alberta rejects hunting deer and elk on game farms. Canoe.Ca, August 8, 2002.

Game farms ‘abhorrent.’ Michelle Mark, Calgary Sun, August 8, 2002.

The Chronic Wasting Disease Controversy

ConsumerFreedom.Com published a review of concerns about chronic wasting disease in deer and elk (often referred to as “mad deer disease.”) Like Mad Cow Disease and Cruetzefeld-Jakobs, CWD involves prions that cause lesions to form in the brain of deer and elk. The current debate is centered around what, if any, risk the disease poses to human beings.

In deer and elk, the disease was first identified in the late 1970s in deer that were held in captivity. The perception, however, is that the disease has spread rapidly with some studies suggesting that as many as 3 percent of deer in some areas may be suffer from CWD.

A major problem in assessing the extent of the risk to human beings is that no one knows how CWD is transmitted. The Mad Cow epidemic was caused when tissues from the central nervous system and brains from cows were fed back to other cows after the rending process. But CWD is clearly infectious in the wild without requiring such an elaborate transmission method, and has also jumped to elk.

As The Center for Consumer Freedom noted, groups such as the Organic Consumers Association and people like John Stauber, author of Mad Cow USA, are claiming that CWD has already killed humans. They point to four cases of young people who died from CJD.

CJD generally kills people in their 60s and 70s, so several cases of the disease among young adults certainly calls for investigation. The Center for Disease Control ruled out Mad Cow Disease as a possible culprit, at which point Stauber and others pointed out that two of the men who died were hunters and a third victim was the daughter of a hunter.

Stauber told The Wall Street Journal back in May that, “I think that we have to assume the worst of CWD — that it could be even more dangerous and costly than mad cow because of its unique ability to spread through the environment and animal to animal.”

This ignores a couple of salient points. First, Stauber never bothers to mention that the CDC also investigated whether or not exposure to CWD might have caused these individuals’ disease, and concluded that there was “no strong evidence for a causal link” between CWD and the deaths of the four people from CJD.

Moreover, Stauber’s claim that CWD can spread quickly from “animal to animal” is a distortion. Obviously it spreads among deer and elk, but there is apparently a species barrier that keeps it from jumping to other mammals. Cows penned in with deer suffering from CWD, for example, do not contract any sort of prion disease from the deer. Besides, the important issue for human beings is whether or not the disease can spread easily from deer/elk to human beings. So far the answer is no.

Even with Mad Cow Disease there is clearly a high species barrier that makes transmission to humans very difficult. Despite all of the claims that potentially tens of thousands of people would die in Great Britain, the number of actual cases of vCJD in the UK has been very small. Traditional food poisoning is a far higher risk to human beings than Mad Cow Disease.

Second, although researchers at the National Institutes of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratory were able to use CWD prions to transform healthy human prions into a deadly diseased form, this transformation turned out to be surprisingly difficult to do even under laboratory conditions.

Rather than the sort of hysteria that Stauber and his ilk promote, a better course is that already adopted by state and federal authorities who are proceeding on numerous fronts to find out once and for all how CWD is spread among deer and elk and what, if any, risk of infection it poses to human beings.

Of course, don’t look for animal rights activists to line up behind such research since it largely involves laboratory research with mice and other animals. In fact, it is fascinating to look at animal rights sites that mention Nobel Prize winner Stanley Prusiner’s ongoing research into prions without even a hint that Prusiner is working with laboratory animals.

Sources:

‘Mad deer’ plague baffles scientists. Antonio Regalado, Wall Street Journal, May 24, 2002.

“Mad Cow”: A Review. Center for Consumer Freedom, July 10, 2002.

Study adds to ‘mad cow’ worries. Lou Kilzer, Rocky Mountain News, March 19, 2002.

Study: Deer with CWD considered edible. Larry Porter, The Omaha World-Herald, April 8, 2002.

The Prion Diseases. Stanley B. Prusiner.

New Jersey Appeals Court Upholds Right of Cities to Hire Deer Hunters

A New Jersey appeals court has rejected an animal rights challenge to a law that allows municipalities to hire professional hungers to cull deer herds.

Groups opposed to deer culls in Princeton Township and White Buffalo had filed separate lawsuits challenging the law, which were consolidated by a three-judge panel. “We reject the claims of unconstitutionality raised in both appeals,” said the panel in its decision. “We uphold the validity and the implementing regulations.”

The decision came as a surprise to Nielson Lewis, a lawyer for one of the groups challenging the law. Lewis had asked for an opportunity to present oral arguments. That request was ignored by the appeals court. Lewis said the group he represents, the Mercer County Deer Alliance, had not yet decided whether to appeal the decision further.

Meanwhile, Trishka Waterbury, a lawyer for Princeton Township, told the Associated Press that this was a complete victory for the township. “This decision completely validates the township’s program.”

Source:

Judge dismisses challenges to the hiring of deer killers. Associated Press, March 29, 2002.