And I don’t mean become an omnivore, which biologists tell us we are naturally. No, no, I mean actually go out, buy a gun, get the training that terrifies the NRA, and go hunting.
It’s what Dana Milbank of WaPo is doing, and his reasoning echoes what I’ve been working out over the last decade:
But I do plan to be an armed vigilante. I will be wielding my gun against a brutal foe — one that destroys our forests, kills our wildflowers, sickens humans and threatens the very survival of birds, mammals, insects and amphibians.
I am becoming a deer hunter.
Yeah?
In the part of the Virginia Piedmont where I have a home, there are between 40 and 50 deer per square mile — compared to only 27 people per square mile. To get things back into ecological balance, [Bernd Blossey of Cornell] estimates, we would need to get the deer population down below 10 per square mile.
And …
None of this is the deer’s fault. They’re doing what they’re supposed to do. It’s our fault for removing their predators, leaving [the deer] free to multiply to unnatural levels. And now it’s our responsibility to fix the mess we’ve created.
A possible sighting of a the infamous winged miniature deer. It’s been attacking pedestrians in the neighborhood for months.
For a liberal pundit like Milbank, it’s the independent thing to do, really. Replacing the predators with anything but ourselves will be unacceptable to certain groups of people, so the next best thing is to resume the hunting which we used to do.
Incidentally, I shan’t be joining him, and not for an ecological or ideological reason. The simple fact of the matter is that I’m an exceptionally clumsy individual; I’ll be the first one to fall out of a deer stand, if I’m so foolish as to go up the ladder, and that’s if I’m lucky. If I’m unlucky, I’ll accidentally shoot someone. So no guns for me.
But Minnesota needs more hunters as well. Milbank cites an annual drop in hunter numbers:
“We’re losing about 3 to 4 percent a year over the last 20 years here in Virginia,” Katie Martin, the head deer biologist for the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources, tells me.
I believe we’re seeing the same in Minnesota.
