Letters

Deer Clap TrapDeer, Peter Hendrickson of Southampton Village writes, after a sojourn in Oregon, “…are a part of life here” [“Harmless And Beautiful,” Letters, October 3]. They are also a part of death and destruction: to people, property and the biosphere; as well as the direct cause of severe and fatal illnesses, extensive damage and quality of life.

This past Sunday near Riverhead, a motorcyclist was severely injured after colliding with a deer that jumped out onto the road in front of him. Was he not “alert and cautious” to the roadside signs “advising of the presence of deer” that Mr. Henrickson advocates increasing proportionate to the increase in deer?

Given the number of deer proliferating, there would have to be walls of signs at a minimum. There is not a “presence” of deer here as he states, but, a horrific and dangerous invasion of enormous numbers of reproducing deer, free to roam, eat, defecate, and destroy unchecked by natural predators or the ability of a Disney-dim population to accept the connections and causation that science has made and to take necessary and protective (to humans) measures.

Wendy Chamberlin [“Change Is Needed, Letters, October 3] confuses “earth’s natural systems”; “climate change bearing down on us”; “denial”; “our children begging in the street” and industrial destruction with the culling of deer.

She, like Mr. Henrickson, are tick deniers. He pooh-poohs the idea that ticks ever attach to human beings from deer. Ms. Chamberlin asserts that, “ticks are not here because the deer are here. And the diseases they carry do not come from deer.”

“Denying this science is no different from denying climate science,” she writes. According to her logic, the increase in parasitic ticks and tick borne diseases are not due to an increase in their hosts: deer, and the mice that come with them. How disputing this idiocy is the same as disputing climate change is anyone’s guess.

Rather than look at the hard data, Ms. Chamberlin reveals an indebtedness to the Disney version. Her anthropmorphized deer: “… feel pain terror, sadness, and loss, just as we do.” Which the big, bad, bow-slinging, blood-thirsty, trophy-hungry, tree-dwelling hunters in their rush for amusement fail to see. Me, too.

As a species loyal member of the human race, I deplore this deer whispering clap trap elevated to “today’s science” by her. I am also decidedly not part of the “we” Ms. Chamberlin references, “who have caused the problem.” I am seeking a solution and Mr. Tessitore has provided one, whether she or the mindless deer like it or not.

Frances GenoveseSouthampton