Bill, it really becomes a matter of... demographics I suppose.
At some level of animal poulation they are cute, a rare sight to be
treasured. Adam tells us FC consider squirrels to be of more amenity value
than the trees! But at some level they become pests. And not just in a
spoiled and sel-serving human context. Here in NE US the population is
reckoned to be as much as 10x 1900 levels. At the same time human population
has grown and urbanized enormously.
We have created the preferred edge habitat. Tens of thousands of square
miles of "protected" woodlands in the form of watersheds, highway verges,
parks, greenbelts, suburban housing tracts ad infinitum. Interspersed with
similar areas of golf coures, suburban lawns, remnant pasture ad infinitum
with guess what? That deer salad bar of suburban shrubbery.
And add in the mix the virtually extinct population of hunters and predators
(though coyotes are coming back, breeding with domestic canines and producing
coy-dogs some places I'm told, and in the rural fringes some reports of large
native cats) and there you have it.
Billions in $US losses from deer-auto collissions. Substantial losses to
commercial crops and suburban gardens. And perhpas most expensive of all
deer are one of the hosts of the disease vectoring deer tick. Lyme disease -
a nasty spirochete - is epidemic in humans and dogs.
So while I'm not a hunter myself, there os real logic to hunting as a
population supression measure. I suppose the fox hunting crowd would be
perfectly happy with dogs running deer to ground and tearing them apart. A
bit grizzly for the public footpath users. But I imagine there are breeds
that will just bark at them and scare them away. The Goldens and Labs would
probably want to play with them but the deer won't quite get it. Border
Collies are much more vigilant I reckon.
SC
----- Original Message -----
From: Andersonarb@xxxx.com
To: UK Tree Care
Sent: Thursday, December 22, 2005 3:49 AM
Subject: Re: Deer protection
I'm a bit ambivalent about the hunting subject.... I'm not sure I would go
so
far as to get a dog but if they were my trees ....?
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