If you thought things in the news couldn’t get any stranger …
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has proposed a solution to Staten Island’s burgeoning deer population. To keep numbers in check, de Blasio plans to authorize a three-year experiment in which all bucks are given vasectomies, then released back into their urban environment. Price tag: an estimated $2 million.
The logistics of this misguided form of wildlife management alone show the plan is doomed to fail. The number of deer in Staten Island has jumped from two dozen in 2008 to more than 700 in 2014 — certainly well north of that figure two years later. Capturing every buck is practically impossible, despite the intended use of air-dropped nets and tranquilizer darts.
An article from Staten Island Advances’s silive.com said the city would be nuts (their words) to try to sterilize every buck in the herd.
“It’s difficult for me to come up with all the reasons why this is a really stupid plan,” Bernd Blossey, an ecologist at Cornell University, told the site. “It’s ridiculous from the onset.”
Blossey was called in to consult with City Hall in November, but clearly his concerns went unheeded.
He isn’t alone in his incredulity of the plan, either. Dr. Paul Curtis, also of Cornell, told the New York Post, “This proposal has no chance of success whatsoever.”
Dr. Bob Warren of The Deer Laboratory at the University of Georgia told the Post that does will simply come back into heat if not impregnated, stretching the typical rut from the fall into winter or beyond. Bucks from outside the borough could move in to breed with the does, further negating the costly experiment’s efforts.
“It won’t even get to that point because I think it would be extremely difficult to get even 50 percent of the bucks” captured and operated on, Curtis said.
The campaign is the first of its kind in the U.S. Other cities have tried doe sterilization, with Bloomington, Indiana, putting the cost of one doe between $600 and $1,000, not including “ongoing maintenance.” No word on how much each individual vasectomy is estimated to cost, but the doe figures provide a rough guesstimate.
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