Stop managing deer and take action

To the Editor:

Well, we made it through another summer, more people, more ticks, more tick-related diseases, more tick talks, more handwringing about solutions. Several weeks ago I went to a talk by Dick Johnson (I have been to others other years), and again I was impressed by how thoughtful he is and how much work he has put in over many years. To sum up my takeaway: The tick and tick-disease problems are getting worse and the only realistic solution is to remove the deer, or at least most of the deer.

We have tried various solutions in the past, like an experiment with “4-Posters” to apply Frontline to the deer. We have increased the length of the hunting seasons and increased the bag limit. The result is there are more deer today than ever, so tweaking these solutions is unlikely to make a major change in the populations of deer or ticks.

The solution to reducing the deer population is purely political. To go back to the end of WW II –– there were no deer left on Martha’s Vineyard, they had been extirpated long before. So in the 1940s, a group of sportsmen on the Island got together with the state fish and game people and organized the introduction of deer, both white-tailed and fallow deer. The fallow deer did not survive for long, but the introduction of white-tailed deer may have been the most successful program the State of Massachusetts ever carried out. We have now had 75-plus years of managing white-tailed deer so sportsmen can have a large animal to hunt. The time has come to reconsider that program and all its ramifications.

The simplest way to reverse the growing deer population is to stop managing it. We do not manage the rat population and rats are still with us, but because people are free to kill rats any time, by whatever means, we keep their population under some kind of control. If we remove all the rules about killing deer, I expect a large drop in the population the first year and then a slow decline in the remainder over many years. Getting rid of all the deer in a government-run program would be expensive, difficult, and politically unlikely. Simply making the political decision to stop regulating deer could be far quicker and cost tax payers nothing.

What next? Talk about ticks and deer to your friends. Talk to your select people, your representatives on the boards of health, the county commissioners, the Martha’s Vineyard Commission representatives. If you think ticks and the diseases they carry are a serious problem, now is the time to talk about it. Even getting rid of outdated regulations takes time and the desire for change. Make the change happen, talk now.

Chris Murphy

Chilmark