Should Americans shoot — and eat — more deer?

When Anne Sheret and her husband Peter moved to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula from Vermont they bought 80 acres of land — half of which was continuous forest, full of Christmas tree cookie-cutter balsams and a smattering of papery birch hardwoods.

It was beautiful. Until the deer gobbled it all up.

About four or five years ago, a newly arrived neighbor began feeding the deer “a smorgasbord morning and night,” she said. “Pete took a picture of something like 55 deer in her yard.”

But deer, particularly white-tailed, are not just overrun in the Sheret’s pocket of Yooper country. 

The 36 million or so brown-eyed mammals — nearly extinct at the turn of the 20th century — are terrorizing America’s trees. Forest ecologist Don Waller told Straight Arrow that deer are destroying biodiversity, contributing to more car accidents and spreading disease. Meanwhile, various state wildlife management agencies have been reluctant to change the way they mitigate deer overpopulation, leaving conservationists with limited options to reduce growth.

Waller trained as a population biologist specializing in plants. While he was a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1980s, a student approached to study the negative effects of deer overpopulation.

For the next several decades, Waller dedicated his academic career to raising the alarm bells about the way deer overbrowse the forest, gorging themselves on slow-growing conifers like cedar, hemlock and Canada yew — which one of Waller’s colleagues dubbed “ice cream for deer.” 

That diet not only destroys the ecological diversity of the forest, but threatens the entire habitat, Waller added. 

“A forest that’s all maple or all the same age or more monotonous … it’s going to be more susceptible,” he said. “I mean we’ve already seen it. It’s more susceptible to fire. It’s more susceptible to insects and disease. It’s more susceptible to climate change. It’s more fragile. It’s less resilient. And it’s not a small effect.”

An outdated model

In the early 1900s, American conservationists banded together to pass several national laws to help regenerate the deer herd, which had been decimated to a fraction of its original population.

Many of these practices were codified in the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation — a set of seven principals to govern wildlife management and conservation. Notably, the model outlaws commercial hunting and market sale of wildlife. 

Meanwhile, in an effort to boost population growth, many states implemented deer management practices that encouraged hunters to favor harvesting bucks over does, implementing strict “bag limits” — or, how many deer you can hunt in a day — and imposing high penalties for shooting deer outside of designated seasons, Waller told Straight Arrow.

New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s senior wildlife biologist, Brendan Quiroin said those policies made sense in the early 20th century. The passenger pigeon had recently been declared extinct, and deer, bison and wild turkeys were not far behind.

“So many of the premises of the model reinforce conservation of the species and making sure that we don’t go back to situations where species are almost being extirpated or eliminated because of market hunting,” he said.

But Quirion said the model doesn’t make sense anymore.

That’s why New York is implementing a statewide “Earn-a-2nd-Buck” system that incentivizes hunters to harvest antlerless deer — the females — before shooting and killing a buck, he said. 

Quirion, who is the department’s Big Game Unit Leader, added that this year will include an expanded antlerless hunting season in September and the state will offer hunters a total of four permits — two more than last year.

“I think the message that I’m trying to get across to hunters in particular is that antlerless deer harvest is really important for herd management and herd health,” he said.

Waller joked that he’s subscribed to deer hunting magazines for years but never seen a doe grace the front page.

“I wait in vain for a cover girl,” he said. “You know, there’s never been one.”

Hunting politics at play

Not all state wildlife departments have the political support to enact progressive herd management policies, like the “Earn-a-2nd-Buck” program, said former Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Board Chairman Dave Clausen.

The state previously had its own “Earn-a-Buck” program and also held an October antlerless hunting season that was nearly as popular as the regular season, he said. Then a group of hunters complained to the Wisconsin legislature, and both policies were repealed in 2011.

“[Earn-a-Buck] just made hunters livid,” Waller said. “You know, if they had the monster buck before them with the giant rack, and they couldn’t pull the trigger because they hadn’t got their doe yet, that just was beyond the pale.”

Clausen, an active deer hunter, bought his farm in western Wisconsin in 1976 and over the years planted 50,000 red oak trees. By 2015 they were all dead because of deer, he said.

The concerned conservationist, who has studied how Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) affects white-tailed deer, is also worried the disease can jump across animal species.

“The deer are now probably more highly populated than they have ever been,” Clausen told Straight Arrow. “[But] we are still managing them like they’re an endangered resource when in reality that is not the case at all.”

A few states southeast of Wisconsin, Clint McCoy is paying close attention to New York’s policies and the challenges that deer overpopulation poses in Ohio.

“It’s a supply and demand issue really is what it comes down to,” said McCoy, who is the Ohio Department of Natural Resource’s Deer Program Administrator. “We have a large supply of deer and the demand for deer has declined.”

McCoy said typically most hunters don’t harvest beyond one to two deer a season. So how can the department encourage folks to shoot and kill more?

“I think that is where a lot of focus has turned to in several states, us included, to … encourage … the use of donation programs and making it more convenient for hunters to harvest additional deer that they won’t use themselves,” he told Straight Arrow.

I’ll have the venison, please

Donation networks are one loophole around the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation’s strict limitations on the sale and distribution of venison.

New York, Wisconsin and Ohio all prohibit the market sale of venison. There is no federal law, but only Vermont — where hunters can buy and sell big game during hunting seasons — and Hawaii — where axis deer are considered an endangered species — are allowed to sell venison commercially.

McCoy said Ohio started its venison donation program last year and hunters donated 182 deer, which created 30,000 servings of protein from over 7,000 pounds of ground venison. That meat made its way to shelves across 17 different food pantries in 10 counties.

The wildlife division commandeered a butchering facility in central Ohio that one of the state’s correctional facilities no longer uses as a base for the donation program, he said. The division plans to expand operations this year with increased refrigerated cooling trailers and additional partnerships with nonprofit organizations and food banks.

“I think the question still is out there as to how successful it can be at scale,” McCoy said. “We don’t have the means to be collecting donated deer in every town. So it becomes a question of how far we can scale it.”

So will we ever see venison on the menu at our local steakhouse or at the butcher counter?

Waller said he would like to see state wildlife officials experiment with  market hunting and commercial sales to manage overpopulation.

“Let’s not go back to the free-for-all days that killed off passenger pigeons and bison,” he cautioned. “But, yeah, let’s reinstitute hunting for deer and make a market for that meat.”

Clausen believes that experiment must come with a strong caveat.

“A good percentage, 15% in Wisconsin, of deer that are shot with lead [bullets] and commercially processed have lead levels that are 1,000 times higher than you would be able to sell meat in Walmart for,” he said. “And so once they start selling that meat, it’s going to have to pass the FDA regulations and that has a very low level of lead.”

For every creative solution to manage overpopulation it seems there are always more roadblocks, and deer, around the bend.

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