Mrs. Bruemmer
LA2
14 December 2011
Deer Hunting is a Good Thing
By: Austin Bailey
You’re driving home from a movie with your best friends and you’re doing about 60 on a country road you’ve known all your life. All of a sudden, out of your peripheral view, you see a couple of deer heading straight for your cars path. You hit the brake to try to avoid them and narrowly miss. You think to yourself how lucky you are that you didn’t hit one. What you didn’t know is the couple of deer you saw used to be a pack of 4 deer. A week earlier, two different hunters each took a deer from that herd. If it wasn’t for the hunters, you probably would’ve hit at least one deer. Deer hunting isn’t as bad as it is portrayed to be! Hunting controls the deer population and along with predator population and the number of accidents involving deer decrease because of good ethical hunting.
You would be amazed at how fast deer reproduce! According to Steve Johnson from The Deer Hunting Guide, during …show more content…
early November to early December is a period called the rut. There are three periods of the rut. The first is called “the pre-rut”. Beginning in late summer or early autumn the blood flow to a buck’s soft antlers stop; they then harden or calcify. The whitetail buck rubs small trees to remove the velvet on his antlers which is now drying up and beginning to shed. A buck will also scent marking trees by rubbing them with the pre-orbital glands located in his forehead and back legs, marking his home area. The rubbing of trees is also a way of strengthening a whitetail’s neck. This prepares him for upcoming light fighting sessions with other buck’s to show his authority to the local deer herd. This is how the buck will attract does and reproduce. Also, according to LeAnn Spencer from the Chicago deer hunting magazine, it happens every year and about 1.2 million baby deer are born. But, along with that, it is estimated that 1.1 million deer are hunted every year. In the early 1900’s, deer were hunted down to 500,000. A deer hunting ban was placed in the U.S to let the population grow and today we have 20-25 million. Without hunting, deer population rose 4,000 % in less than 100 years, so it is a good idea to start conservation.
Have you ever been in an accident involving deer? Well, you are definitely not alone! Lin Doris speaks out from animalrights.com: “In Michigan alone, $130 million is spent a year just repairing car accidents involving deer. Along with that, 5,000 people are killed. It is an obvious problem that could be easily fixed.” So many lives and money is lost. And people have a tough time realizing why the U.S is in such bad debt! My point by saying all this is decreasing deer population by hunting is a good way of deer conservation and it leads to less crashes and lives and money lost.
Not many people know as much as to what other animals are affected by the deer population growing and shrinking suddenly.
It is explained well in the ‘Benefits of Hunting Deer’ section on ehow.com. If you think about it, if the deer population increases, then the predators that prey on deer will thrive due to good food supply. Even more accidents happen to things that prey on deer! It might not be as much, but it is still an unneeded thing. Also, increasing any animal’s population will cause it to spread out to different areas for habitat. One of these places may be a city where people are everywhere. Needless to say there are very stupid people in this world and they will do stupid things to animals. Any animal is not afraid to defend itself and you would be surprised at their strength. People could get very hurt being so up close and personal to animals. Therefore, decreasing deer population also decreases predator count; decreasing accidents, money lost, etc.
(Chavis) It is easy to see that there are many positive aspects to deer hunting! Deer hunting doesn’t only affect the deer population; it decreases other animal’s populations and keeps animals health in check. Next time you narrowly miss a deer in a car, think of a hunter. Or, next time you kill a nice deer, you can go home knowing you fed your family along with possibly saving a life. It’s a win/win situation!
http://www.the-deer-hunting-guide.com/strategies/hunting-deer-the-rut/