Deer Slayers: Examining the Scope of and Arguments for and against Legal Deer Theriocide in the US

Abstract

Deer hunting has a long history in the US. It is supported by hunting cultures, described as necessary for protecting forest/plant biodiversity and ecosystems, but opposed by animal welfare and rights advocates as cruel. Using multiple literature sources, we examine the trade-off between protecting deer and ecosystems from harm in the context of contemporary America. We examine various approaches for exploring harms affecting nonhuman animal populations found in the green criminological, environmental sociology, wildlife conservation and management, and ecological literature. We argue that making sense of these opposing positions requires examining the extent of deer hunting to quantify those harms in some way. Here, we examine reported deer kills for US states for the period 1999–2020. These data indicate that nearly 7 million deer are taken annually in the US. We also examined some hypothesized correlates of deer harvesting across states. While these data tell us something about the number of deer killed, these data alone are insufficient. We argue no clear conclusion about the acceptability of deer hunting can be reached given the difficulty rectifying opposing moral/philosophical positions on deer hunting, opposing deer management objectives, and scientific evidence on the ecological impacts of deer populations in the US under contemporary conditions that include shrinking forest ecosystems and impaired ecosystem stability.