Deer have become a pest in the north-east in the absence of an apex predator. As a farmer-to-be, I’m happy to fill that role. Looking into the rules around deer hunting, I find a heavily state-regulated season. Two types of guns are each allowed a month, with another month for bow and arrow. Hardly a regime designed to deter deer. A friend speculates that the rules have been designed by the gun lobby to make it easy to hunt deer. My daughter notes that the incentive to have two different types of gun certainly points to that influence.
A hunter from the neighborhood knocks on our door and offers to lease our land for hunting for $180 a year. He presents himself as a steward of the land, one who leases a few contiguous properties to keep out the “bad hunters” who scare away deer and shoot the babies. He even plants corn on my neighbor’s land to draw in deer. It occurs to me that he and I may not have the same interests vis-à-vis deer. Then again, I can view him as a follower of the Mesolithic practice of maintaining semi-wild feedlots for semi-domesticated herds like the Sami do in contemporary Scandinavia. So I take his money and buy a couple of orange hats.