Cornell University is complicit in the “genocide” of deer, according to a local hunter.
For years now, the university and Cayuga Heights have been in a battle against the local deer population.
One way the campus seeks to control the deer population is by allowing hunters to kill deer on campus. But there is reportedly so much hunting on campus and in the area that one man thinks the school is allowing a genocide.
“I don’t believe there should be any hunting on Cornell land,” Bill Enslow told The Cornell Daily Sun. “But if there [is], do what the state does with their hunting season, don’t say, ‘well, the deer are killing off the woods,’ and do a genocide right now.”
Enslow said he has a problem with allowing the hunting of pregnant deer.
The student newspaper reported:
White-tailed deer, the only deer allowed to be hunted on Cornell-owned land, breed from October through January and give birth in late spring — the same time frame that [Deer Damage Permits] allow for extended hunting.Enslow said he and other hunters he’s spoken to in the area “don’t like the ethics of shooting pregnant does and fawns after the regular hunting season.”
This is not the first time Cornell has tried to control the deer population. However, a past attempt had the opposite effect, attracting more deer to the area.
As reported by Legal Insurrection in 2014, officials first tried tubal ligations, or sterilization, of female deer, along with some hunting.
The problem, though, is that this leaves the female deer in heat, which means they attract more bucks.
As the Washington Post reported at the time:
Under normal conditions, all female whitetails go into heat within several weeks of each other and become pregnant at around the same time. This annual event is called the rut. However, if a doe is not impregnated during the rut, it will enter heat again the following month and again the month after that. Because the ligated does were unable to become pregnant, they continued to produce chemical signals of readiness to reproduce — signals that can attract bucks from miles away.
Or, put better by the Post, the policy created “buck magnets.”
And there we have a solution to Enslow’s concerns about genocide: find some does, let them loose, and wait for the bucks to come. Whether they are sterilized or not, Cornell will end up with more deer on campus.
[Featured image courtesy of National Park Service]
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