I would like to urge the individuals who have offered their input on this subject to make their opinions known, not only to Township Committee members, the majority of which are adamant supporters of this slaughter; but to the Item, as well, who continually and categorically support the Township’s stand, refraining from the exercise of any intellectual curiosity or independent research of the facts and science as they relate to this issue.

From an individual perspective, the extremely offensive, exclusively human-centric value system that our community’s continued deer slaughtering suggests, makes the community of Millburn a community that, despite my families 50 year history, has become one which I am eager to separate from as soon as is practical.

I am not sure we will solve this debate…and we are only half way through the Essex County Deer Management Program that ends on Thursday 2/28.

Let you all think about this before you become too impressed with your own opinions of how you’re going to fix the problem. Evidently, he didn’t feel a need to create more predators for the deer. Maybe we should stop building our roads in the middle of their land.

Anyone who feels a deer should be killed because it’s eating their precious flowers, should move back to the city and buy a windowbox.

Now, Bambi is still there, but all the rest: forest regrowth,
flora and fauna diversity is greatly diminished and, if nothing is
done, will be pretty much gone, possibly in our, or our children’s,
lifetime. The cause is the overpopulation of overabundant deer.

In our, and many suburban areas, this is not a case of encroachment
or reduction of habitat by humans, as some misguided folk claim,
but unbridled, near explosive, growth of the deer. This is clearly
not the tragedies of the Silverback apes or Siberian tigers whose
numbers are reducing to near extinction; rather precisely the opposite,
unfettered growth. This well studied and well documented growth of the
deer and other ungulates has resulted from factors such as elimination
of natural predators, the deer’s extraordinary reproductive capacity
(e.g., fawns born in the spring will be carrying their own fawns by
fall) and probably global warming (e.g., still green grass in January
and less food needed to eat to keep warm).

The result of this overabundance is that the deer have now assumed the
role of habitat destroyers. They are achieving this role not only in
South Mountain, but all over NJ, the US, North America and many more
places on our planet Earth. Even if one questions the preciseness
of their growth statistics, few would argue they have doubled, if
not tripled over the past 25-40 years. Even without the statistics,
who among us, from our own observations, disputes this growth?

While there will always be a minority, a quite vocal minority,
who disagree with the need for reduction, the majority advocating
reduction includes many stewards of our land: the NJ Audubon Society,
the New Jersey Conservation Foundation, the South Mountain Conservancy and the National Wildlife Research Center (NWRC) of the USDA.
Of course, there is also the divisive issue of how to achieve this
reduction. Again, the minority typically allude to non-lethal fictions
such as deer contraceptives. However, along with all their other proposed
non-lethal solutions, the accurate, unarguable fact is that there
is not now and not in the foreseeable future, a contraceptive that
is effective on free roaming deer herds. Even the NWRC, which is
spearheading the research of Gonacon wildlife contraceptive states
in their website FAQ:

Q. Will GonaCon eliminate the need for hunting to control
deer overpopulation?
A. No. Contraception alone cannot reduce
overabundant deer populations to healthy levels. GonaCon is a tool
to be used in conjunction with other wildlife management methods.

So, my answer to the original question, “What do you think?”: I think
that the planned deer culling which, has a goal of 20 deer per square
mile is a worthy, much needed endeavor, which will insure that Bambi and her myriad offspring,
a healthy forest with flora and fauna diversity will be with us,
our children and generations to come.