Conservation Is A Dirty Word

Normally, I’d write about data, cross-referencing studies that prove that all lethal deer control measures are ineffective and result in rebounding populations. But this time, I’m writing from the heart.

MY STORY: A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I once believed that thinning deer herds was a necessary evil. I grew up in Lakewood and lived there until early 2007, when we moved to Seven Hills. I’d been commuting from Lakewood to Pepper Pike for work and had an extremely close call off road with a darting doe. I bought into the culling deer as conservation myth. As a Metroparks volunteer attending an annual meeting, it didn’t even phase me one enchanted, full moonlit night while sharpshooters killed deer outside.

What changed? One day, an acquaintance who had long spouted facts and vitriol was on another one of her rants about deer killing in Solon. I didn’t trust people like her. I thought they protested deer killing and went to McDonald’s afterwards for their McDeath burgers. Besides, I thought, at least deer get to run free before they are slaughtered, unlike the countless farm animals whose entire lives are spent in confined cruelty before crueler death. I countered with something about the necessary evil of killing to reduce numbers. She suggested that I conduct independent research on urban deer populations, killing for profit, and the biology of it all.

MY CREDIBILITY: I started with “compensatory rebound effect,” a fancy term for deer numbers returning to stable populations after sudden, lethal reductions. I found indisputable evidence that the very institutions guilty of slaughtering deer not only do not deny this biological phenomenon, but also publish many papers about it. Intrigued, I had to know why so many educated, intelligent conservationists and government officials condone this if it’s not the right, or at least necessary, thing to do.

Moving along to economics, I found our state-run hunters’ club, Ohio Division of Wildlife, brings in most of its annual revenue from hunting licenses. That was a jumping off point to learning about the formidable hunting lobbyists.

Once I had these kernels of truth at my disposal, it became appallingly easy to uncover more tidbits, to find all the players hiding conspicuously behind their master’s degrees and collective authority. Cleveland Metroparks, Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Ohio Division of Wildlife, Lake Erie Allegheny Partnership, mayors and council members everywhere, and, of course, the mainstream media. The last of these put the final nail in the coffin for deer by always, always referring to them as “overpopulated” and “a nuisance.”

MY EVOLUTION: Recently, I watched the documentary film “Radical Evil,” which examined the social and psychological undercurrents that gave rise to the Nazi Holocaust, or how a nation, led by a maniac, could stand by and allow incomprehensible evil to prevail. (While writing this, my mind keeps going to Trump.)

Filmmakers interviewed a renowned social psychologist. Careful not to psychoanalyze away genocide, he and a military psychologist proved how normally good people can be made to do horrible things.

Light bulb moment!

Killing deer in the name of conservation is akin to the Nazi Holocaust on a number of levels, including the belief that the “threat” must be annihilated. All the players are guilty of large scale Groupthink. I watched every council member in every one of these communities cave to pressure they imagine the majority want, in the form of a March “advisory” ballot measure for a nuisance abatement to allow bow hunting. They think, “How can so many people be wrong? Besides, I’m not the one killing deer. I’m just following orders.”

In “Radical Evil,” Nazi soldiers reenacted the freaking out, vomiting, disassociation, isolation, and other symptoms immediately following a person’s first experience with inflicting deadly violence on others. Filmmakers made it clear that, with time, it became easier and even fun for Nazi soldiers to kill, first via firing squads, millions of people in the name of “ethnic cleansing.” Hunters do this, claiming they are helping with conservation. But what they really do is brag about it in national magazines. They even write about it in psychosexual terms. Hunters experience an adrenaline rush when they kill deer. It’s not for meat; it’s for fun; “sport,” they call it. That’s how the war criminals in “Radical Evil” were portrayed.

Consider the family as a microcosm of society. A child’s first experience hunting/killing an animal is sometimes followed by regret and horror. But the parent, usually a male, tells the child to toughen up. That is how Nazi soldiers were trained, and bolstered and badgered each other to keep up the slaughter.

Interestingly, the “Radical Evil” documentary made it clear that, though we cannot separate the individual from society (i.e. Donald Trump is a symptom of the machine with the Koch Brothers at the helm), it is nonetheless each individual’s responsibility to stand up and consciously fight evil wherever they find it.

Last month, the following quote by Voltaire appeared on the cover: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can also make you commit atrocities.” I would add that evil needs nothing more than for good people to stand by and do nothing.

Lucy McKernan

Animals first.

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Volume 8, Issue 1, Posted 11:48 PM, 01.03.2016