Deer Culling

Will Cost Real Money

To the Editor:

Deer cull advocate David Shugarts’s reported comments last week to the Board of Selectmen [“Selectmen Hear About USDA Deer Culling Program,” Bee, 8/7/09] included the proposal that Newtown pursue a USDA “strategic” deer culling program to reduce Newtown’s herd from 69 deer per square mile to five to ten per square mile at a projected cost of $150 per deer. This would translate to the elimination of over 3,000 deer at a cost of over $500,000 if everything goes according to plan and on budget. In other words, a deer cull program will cost real money that will not be easy to find considering the town’s ongoing struggles to fund our schools and other needs.

A key question to be confronted by the to-be-formed Tick-Borne Illness Committee and ultimately the Board of Selectmen is whether there is any convincing evidence that this kind of financial outlay will actually result in a reduction in Lyme disease. Mr Shugarts observes that dozens of towns have gone down the path of deer culling, but the published evidence of results from these efforts to date is unpromising outside of isolated communities on islands or peninsulas. Perhaps for this reason, none of the experts quoted in a recent online forum conducted by The New York Times concerning the deer/Lyme disease issue recommended culling programs as a solution to Lyme disease (some of these experts questioned whether there is a link between deer and Lyme disease at all).

Considering that so many other towns are pursuing culling programs, more evidence will emerge over time on the basic question of whether culling actually accomplishes what its proponents claim.  Until that time, there is little but supposition to justify any culling program, much less one that entails the expenditure of scarce town resources.  Nor is Lyme disease the ever-increasing problem that some have suggested. While Mr Shugarts said last week that reported Connecticut Lyme disease cases increased by 27 percent in 2008 from 2007, this increase, as with a similar uptick in 2007, is attributable to a change in tracking policies, not a change in actual cases. The CDC revised its Lyme disease monitoring definitions in 2008 to include “probable” cases for the first time in addition to “confirmed” cases in official statistics.  

According to the Connecticut Department of Public Health publication Connecticut Epidemiologist, this change in methodology drove the change in reported cases cited by Mr Shugarts. Indeed, confirmed cases in 2008 actually declined slightly from 2007, according to DPH statistics. None of this is to say that Lyme disease is any less of a problem today than previously, but neither is it a greater problem. Newtown should therefore take a hard, rational look at the competing claims on the deer cull issue before spending money on potentially futile programs whose only sure result is the destruction of wildlife.

Mark Alexander

69 Aunt Park Lane, Newtown                                       August 5, 2009