City won’t kill off east-end deer
The city doesn’t plan to kill off the “surplus” white-tailed deer mooching around east-end Pointe-aux-Prairies park. An expert study had recommended killing 40 of them, three quarters of the 55‑strong herd.
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Kate
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JS 08:04 on 2021-03-19 Permalink
Is it naive to wonder why they can’t just place a trail of bread crumbs from the park to the parking lot and up a ramp into one of those trailers they move horses around in and drive the deer a half hour away to somewhere with more space(and maybe more wolves)?
Kate 08:44 on 2021-03-19 Permalink
Last I saw, Longueuil was planning to do that with some of the deer from Michel-Chartrand park, but I have a feeling it’s more complicated than it looks to move 40 deer.
Would these animals survive if taken away from the city and its resources and dumped in a provincial park someplace?
John B 08:48 on 2021-03-19 Permalink
Moving animals is generally discouraged both by scientists and the law. I’m not sure about deer, but for other animals when you plunk them down into an unfamiliar territory they often have trouble adapting and they die anyway, and they compete with animals already in the area for resources potentially causing the death of animals that were perfectly fine in a balanced ecosystem.
There’s also a risk of transporting a disease with the animals, introducing a new disease into a region.
This is a human-made problem. In the natural world deer are not at the top of the food chain, but we’ve created areas where they are, and they’re “destroying” (I would argue that “changing” may be more accurate), the parks they’re in. IMO we should find a way to keep the deer out of the forest if we don’t want them doing what deer do, add predators to the forest, or accept the role of predators ourselves.