Deer Crazy
by Jane Smith

When comedian Louis C. K. lived in the city, he thought deer were just grand. Out for a spin in the country with friends, he would stop the car and quietly switch off the ignition when he saw one. “He’s just so mysterious and beautiful,” he would whisper to his friends, “God gave us a gift, everybody. Just enjoy the gift of the beautiful deer.”

That was before he got a place in Columbia County. When he began to see deer in his yard every day, scales fell from his eyes. They infected his then-wife with Lyme disease, he tells us. They upset his dog. The last straw was the collision.

Driving to Walgreens one evening, he saw an indecisive deer by the side of the road. After giving every indication of having decided not to cross, the deer hurled himself at his car. “I heard him break his own [expletive deleted] neck,” Louis C. K. says in the funniest moment of his 2008 comedy special on Showtime. “And then he just dragged his stupid deer head into the woods and he died. And I’m glad he’s dead. I was glad right away.” He was so glad he got out of the car and yelled obscenities into the woods. “I hope your deer wife finds you dead and dies of a broken heart,” he tells the dead deer. “I hope your deer babies starve to death. You broke my mirror, you [many expletives deleted].”

Something about deer drives us to extremes of nuttiness. The obvious explanation is the exponential increase in the population of white-tailed deer over the last 30 years. No one really knows how many whitetails now live in the lower 48 states, but the possibility of as many as 15 million Odocoileus virginianus in close proximity makes us nervous. Like you or me, they are partial to the mixture of forests and clearings in southeastern New York: new neighbors who come and go at odd hours, have peculiar eating habits that involve your favorite azalea bush, and can easily jump over your head. Such behavior would nonplus a lot of people, though many find it charmingly eccentric.

But this explanation is not satisfactory. Deep and complex currents are at work.

Consider what most of us believe about Lyme disease. “The public believes something that all scientists know is not the case,” says Dr. Richard Ostfeld, a disease ecologist on the staff of Cary Institute of Ecosystems Studies. “We know beyond question that deer don’t infect ticks with the Lyme pathogen.” It’s the other way around. Moreover, the Lyme-producing bacteria that ticks transmit to deer never come back out to infect comedians’ wives or anyone else. “In other words,” Ostfled says apologetically, “the buck stops with the buck.”

As for a correlation between the deer and tick populations, scientists split on this issue, but Ostfeld thinks there’s no cause-and-effect relationship. His book, Lyme Disease: The Ecology of a Complex System, published last year by Oxford University Press, argues that the studies showing a strong parallel were often conducted on islands. One of the most influential Lyme studies, conducted on Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine, found that the tick population dwindled dramatically when hunters shot the island’s entire herd of deer. Ostfeld is far too articulate to say “duh,” but that’s what he means when he points out that there were no other hosts—no raccoons, opossums, skunks, or foxes—for the adult tick population to feed on. On the mainland, however, deer are hardly the only game in town.

If people want healthier hosta, fewer car collisions, and more fecund forests, reducing deer herds by 20 to 30 percent will do that, he says, especially if you shoot does. “But it’s not effective in reducing tick numbers,” says the disease ecologist, “and we shouldn’t pretend that it is. We need to separate our ethical and moral perspectives from the scientific evidence,” we need to be sure not to “make up junk science.”

In light of Ostfeld’s words, it’s instructive to reflect on recent outbreaks of deer nuttiness. Last January, you may remember, there was a commotion over in Poughkeepsie when supervisors of the Vassar Farm and Ecological Preserve noticed that its 100 deer denizens were nibbling the understories of the forest into extinction and “driving the ecological trajectory of the preserve.” They were also springing at motorists, decimating daylilies, and totally unsympathetic to sufferers of Lyme disease. A smaller population—say only 15 deer—would much diminish their ability to drive anything anywhere.

What to do with the other 85 deer? The options were fencing, contraception, transportation to a faraway place, or death by gun. Vassar’s solution was to hire White Buffalo to take the deer to the Happy Hunting Ground. White Buffalo, it turned out, was not a Native American elder, wise in the ways of the whitetail, but a non-profit outfit whose president is a white man with a PhD in wildlife ecology and a high-powered rifle. He’s rumored to have managed 44 deer one night all by himself during Phase 1 of the operation.

Sharpshooter outfits like White Buffalo have a three-step managing procedure. First, scope out the territory so you don’t accidentally shoot somebody. Second, set out mounds of corn in the same spot for a few days until word gets round to a sufficient number of deer. Third, use a spotlight to blind the herd, then set your sights on the adult does and pull the trigger. If you’re managing deer closer to human habitation, throw a net over several deer and shoot a steel rod into their skulls, a death that deer find particularly stressful.

There was no Phase 2. Locals who’d grown fond of the whitetails formed an organization called Save Our Deer. When they returned to campus, some students and faculty claimed that the college had deliberately concealed its dark and bloody plans. There was a candlelight vigil. Ceding victory to public opinion, Vassar called off the deer slayers. It seems likely that those whitetails are currently enjoying the rutting season, which started in October and ends this month. Whether White Buffalo will return someday no one seems to know, and the college isn’t talking.

The Poughkeepsie nuttiness, though, was nothing compared to Princeton, New Jersey’s. About a decade ago, a herd of 800 or so whitetails moved in, no doubt drawn by the gourmet landscaping. If you’ve never been there, Princeton’s a lovely, if rarified, town, where homes are so close to each other they sort of overlap. Many citizens of Princeton resent their neighbors, even those they’ve never laid eyes on, for invading space they feel should rightfully be their own. One deer a day dies on the grill of a BMW or Saab. You can imagine with what gladness many Princetonians welcomed the deer, especially the doe that gave birth on someone’s front porch.

Perhaps the porch was the mayor’s, as that might explain a great deal of what happened next. Three guesses as to whom she called in to cull the herd. White Buffalo followed the usual management procedures, but fewer and fewer deer were showing up for free dinners. The mayor had her suspicions, so the town hired a helicopter to hover over Princeton’s rooftops scouting for telltale piles of corn. The mayor was right. Opponents of deer slaying were offering competitive snacks in places no sharpshooter would dare fire. The town, naturally, passed a no-deer-feeding ordinance. Things got really ugly—many arrests, a handful of death threats, a cat deliberately crushed to death—and Princeton’s never quite been the same.

It’s difficult, now, to conceive of our landscape without the whitetails. On the morning of November 10, 1897, the passengers and crew on a train traveling the Poughkeepsie and Eastern Railroad saw a doe running along the track ahead of the locomotive. “It is many years since deer have been seen in Dutchess County,” reported the New York Times, which carried the story on page 3. “The engineer slowed the train,” wrote the Times correspondent, “so that everyone might admire a beautiful doe before she bounded away into the woods.” The forests once covering 80 percent of the state had long ago been cleared for crops, and the deer had disappeared with the trees.

I’d like to believe, with Dr. Ostfeld, that we humans have the capacity to disentangle our emotional responses to nature from our rational ones. When I got Lyme disease last year, I verbally abused “deer ticks” right and left, despite knowing that name reinforces popular prejudice against Odocoileus virginianus. I should have been abusing the black-legged tick.

When he’s a very old man, it’s possible that Louis C. K. may not give the indecisive deer by the side of the road a second thought as he heads for Walgreens in his electric car. He will save his choicest words for the whitetail’s bigger, badder cousin. Moose vanished from New York after the Civil War, but apparently they’re making a comeback.

I want to thank Perceval Inkpen for introducing me to Louis C.K., whose 2008 Showtime special Chewed Up was released earlier this year on DVD.