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Show Life and other trivialities . . . Let's save our deer herds by Steve Christensen Assistant Editor A few weeks ago on a trip from Vernal Ver-nal to Salt Lake City I counted 17 dead deer along side the road. On a recent trip between Lavan, Utah and Gunnison, Utah ( about 30 miles) I counted 57 dead deer. No one intentionally tries to hit a deer with his car, but people do. One time I was on the same Highway 89 between Gunnison and Levan just before daylight. As I rounded a turn my headlights shown upon 11 deer standing in the middle of the road. Two turned to look at my vehicle. The rest stood staring in the other direction, direc-tion, into the headlights of a large diesel truck. I hit my brakes and stopped just in time to see the truck splatter seven of the deer all over the road. I don't know if he was exceeding the speed.lirn.it, and I don't know if he could have stopped if he had wanted to, but that consideration ' , .obviously never crossed his mind. He hit the herd of deer as hard as the first bomb hit Hiroshima. By the time f stopped I was only about 20 feet from where the truck hit the deer. , Blood and guts rained on my pickup. I got sick to my stomach and just had to . sit there and stare at the floor for several minutes before I could even look up . again. When I finally looked up I saw two deer trying to get over the fence in the , barrow pit. One was dragging its entire ' rearend, the other was missing an entire rear leg. The other five deer which had been hit were now history. I immediately immediate-ly thought about helping the two deer that were still alive, but when I though about it, it was obvious there was nothing anyone could do. The one with the missing miss-ing leg had laid down in the barrow pit, the other was frantically dragging itself back and forth along the fence, trying to find a place to get through. I decided the only thing I could , possibly do to help them was to get the i ordeal over as quickly as possible. As I 'shot the second of the two, I glanced up j to the sidehill and saw the four lucky 'members of the original herd standing 'looking over their shoulder at what was going on. I had nothing to do with it, but I still felt guilty. Later, as I thought back on that experience, ex-perience, I wondered what could be done to keep the same sort of thing from happening hap-pening again, or even save the lone deer from being hit by an unwilling motorist. Sportsmen are continually complaining about deer heards dwindling. Every year there are special doe permits issued in the fall to help kill off a bunch of deer so the rest can make it through the winter. Thousands of deer die each year from starvation and thousands more are hit by motorists. At Hardware Ranch, in Cache County, elk are fed each winter so there is more natural foliage for animals that don't come down into the ranch. It's basically a program to keep wildlife from starving. starv-ing. I wondered why this same sort of thing couldn't be done in other areas. Not only would it keep deer from starving, but it would also provide an area where the deer would congregate and keep them away from highways. I called the Wildlife Resources office in Salt Lake City and asked if this was a feasibility? They said no. They don't have funds to do something like that, and besides, if you start feeding deer in the winter you disturb the natural order of things, which just isn't right. I found that last statement very disturbing. We can't feed deer because we disturb the natural order of things. I was so dumbfounded at his logic I couldn't even continue the conversation. I wonder what he thinks the migration of man originally did to the natural order of things in relation to the deer herd. If you look at where most cities and towns are located, you find they are located in the most plush valley locations possible. Basically in the areas where deer herds spend the winter if man hadn't disturbed disturb-ed the natural order of things. Now I don't advocate man should leave and give the land back to.the deer and Indians, but I think when things change, our thinking should also change. The lack of funding does raise a very viable problem You can't do things for anyone or anything without the resources to do them I wonder how many of our hunters are real sportmen? It will be interesting in-teresting to see how many letters to the editor we get when I advocate increas-' ing the deer hunting license to $50. By increasing the permit to $50 we accomplish ac-complish two things. First, we limit hunting hun-ting to those people who really want to go, thus keeping the number and sizi deer at much higher levels than in past. We also increase the Wild Resource budget substantially, in or to feed the increased deer as a'resul less hunters. This would likewise crease the deer herds by keeping th away from highways. I can already hear some of arguments. "You are limiting the h to the wealthy. The deer hunt is aire; for the wealthy. How much actual m comes from an average size deer? F: pounds? Maybe 75? A deer license now costs $10, but o one out of three get a deer each year for each deer shot, $30 in licenses i spent. Gas costs somewhere betweer and $1.25 a gallon. Being conservative, a person only drives 50 miles round! to their favorite hunting spot. At I5mi per gallon, that adds another $3 lo $4 the cost of hunting, and since a pen only averages one deer every th years, that is between $9 and $12 ai tional cost for the meat they get, and t isn't even counting wear and tear on automobile. Besides this, a hunter m purchase orange clothing (which wouldn't be caught dead in after hunt), plus boots, bullets, knife, ri scope, and many even a four-wheel di pickup so you can get up to where really big deer are. If you add everything together ; divide it by the number of pounds venison an average hunter eats, if yoi for the meat you might as well stay he and barbecue T-bones. If a person really wants to hunt, isn't going to make a big differenci whether he goes or not. If only half of usual 200,000 hunters purchase deer mits at the inflated price, we couldh two and a half times the amounl revenue coming in, not to mention I ger and better deer herds, plus capability of feeding them, and if herds then got too large, you could: offer special hunting licenses later in season at a reduced price. Let's stop talking about wild management, and do something abo for a change. Three million dollars feed a lot of deer. And perhaps we ct even find a little money each yeai start to build deer fences along re; bad sections of our highways. |
