To the Editor:
I want to preface this by saying I am not against hunting. I eat venison. I understand responsible hunting is the only way we can maintain a healthy deer population aside from the reintroduction of predators. Furthermore, as a veterinarian who has a lot of training in pathology, I’ve seen more “gory” things than the average person on the street.
However, I would like to comment about the photo used on the front page of the latest Martha’s Vineyard Times. I understand it was presented to illustrate and educate people about how a deer’s age is determined. But when I unfolded my newspaper and saw a dead deer with his right commissure sliced open, with a glassy eye and a sad grotesque grimace, I was a bit shocked.
I’m sure you are receiving complaints about it. My main concern is that it is in plain view of small children, whose experience of deer may be limited to Bambi or The Yearling, and to whom death may not yet be a hard grim reality. I know it would have given me nightmares, and I knew death at a young age.
Perhaps the image would have been more appropriate, say, on page A7.
Catherine “Betsy” Buck VMD
Oak Bluffs