Letters

Write on, Mike Wright!

In his column “In The Field” [Sports & Outdoors], Mike Wright reports on chaos. Inconsistencies, selectivity, head-scratching policies and slapstick enforcement. He can’t avoid it — he is writing about the State Department of Environmental Conservation. Frustration and mayhem are the hallmarks of this agency, which considers itself “underfunded and understaffed.” That is not my recollection of the incompetent, facetious and willfully ignorant bench-warmers I was forced to deal with for over 30 years.

Mr. Wright asks that the DEC back-burner its selective enforcement of deer hunting rules, given their numbers and the threats they pose, and to give some attention to enforcement of laws regarding actual endangered species [“Deer Bait, Dead Sturgeon And Bass Blitzes,” In the Field, October 31]. Fat chance.

Human beings come first on my list of endangered species: water and air pollution, climate change, oceans rising, potable water receding, resistant bacteria and spiraling taxes, threatening many kinds of extinction.

Then there are more immediate and day-to-day threats, like asphalt dust, illegal dumping, uncontrollable fires, sickening stench, endless vibrations and unendurable noise, to name just a few, that fall under the DEC’s remit. These miseries were produced at will by the pillars of the community known collectively as “Rambo Inc.” The DEC couldn’t have cared less. Living next to this anomalous, regulation-free 13-acre patch (which the town and village ignored) unfortunately necessitated my having to be in contact with the DEC and the equally ineffective Board of Health — one representative of that illustrious body surprised me with a callback, but only to opine that “arsenic could be beneficial.” My neighbors were dumping it into the ground.

Somehow, the DEC clowns that tumbled out of their tiny car came reluctantly, if at all, when summoned but could never find the slightest infraction of this sand mining and composting hell hole. Not a single fine was collected or violation issued. As regulators, they were world-class enablers.

But now they are racing about hunting the deer hunters with fervor, and smacking them with fines. All power to the hunters who are out there hunting the despised deer under a confusing set of rules and hoping not to run afoul of the “underpaid” enforcers.

They are trying to cull the endlessly reproducing marauding deer herds: carriers of disease, despoilers of property and hazardous to traffic. Said species, perhaps genetically emboldened by their idyllic life here, also are now attacking people in their gardens when not crashing into beauty salons.

The hunters have the DEC to deal with. We have the onset of Christmas, with Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and the Disney-indoctrinated Bambi pimps, who, with lips quivering, repeat their idiotic mantra: “They were here first …”

Ho. Ho. Ho. And where’s that bottle of rum?

Frances Genovese

Southampton