No Game Management is POOR Game Management

The Beast, his Producer Cindy and her cameraman boyfriend turned right just outside Weirs Beach, Laconia and drove over the little bridge that links Governor’s Island to the Lake Winnipesaukee shore. We were looking for footage of Deer for a story segment on the Beast’s local Hunting and Fishing show about overpopulation of said animals on islands in New Hampshire. One of the Beast’s hunter buddies told him that this little island was the place to go - which seemed quite odd at the time because it’s full of Mansions occupied by the super-rich.

View of Governor’s Island (center-right) and connecting bridge.

It was late November and both the lake and sky were the same dull bluish-gray hue. A sparse rubble of early snow dotted the side of the roads and the beautifully manicured lawns. The snow was slightly deeper in darker parts of the rare pine stands. We drove around the mansions with a sense of futility. Deer here? No way.

Then three of them walked across the road. They came from the side yard of a beautiful Cape-Chalet and ambled into a private road. We goggled. Cindy’s boyfriend hefted his camera. We drove on.

Over the next hour we videotaped dozens of deer, milling about in broad daylight during hunting season no less, seemingly without a care in the world. On a little elite Island that’s essentially just houses and yards, this huge herd was living in the yards. And those yards were showing the strain.

One expects to see ornamental shrubs around a fancy home. Well, not on Governor’s Island. The Deer had eaten them all down to nubs. The only ones still in existence were protected by large chicken wire cones, which took away a lot of their charm. We shot footage. These lovely deer were ravaging this place and there’s not a thing anybody could do to stop it.

Why? Two reasons - it’s illegal in New Hampshire to hunt deer on islands, and it’s illegal to hunt densely settled land. Governor’s Island was both and it seemed that the deer had figured that out.

While rich people are not known for their great love of strangers walking about their property, they tend to tolerate animals. But when the former starts destroying the latter, said tolerance evaporates faster than a snowball in a blast furnace. Residents here were royally pissed off and wanted something done.

Typical Google result for keywords “Governor’s+Island+New+Hampshire.

Well, sort of. They didn’t want the deer shot. They just wanted them gone. And they didn’t want to have to pay for it - the State was supposed to take care of that. And they didn’t want any more strangers on the island either.

So nothing got done. And the deer continued to munch away.

A few days later the Beast interviewed a somewhat harried looking New Hampshire Fish&Game biologist who said privately that the homeowners who sponsored these anti-hunting laws for islands did so with the intention of keeping strangers (hunters) away from their homes and away from the pretty-pretty deer, but the unintended consequence was the destruction of said homes by the deer who suddenly weren’t quite so pretty after all. “If these were rats, they’d have been wiped out years ago.” he said. “But they’re Bambi.”

Sentimentality makes a poor basis for Game policy, particularly when urban fantasy meets rural reality. Folks who make their fortunes in the Concrete Canyons of Boston or New York like to think that when they flee to the lovely house on the lake or in the woods that they’ve swapped marauding two-legged predators for the joy of simple country creatures. Unfortunately these creatures really don’t care about what they’re supposed to be and tend to go on being what they really are: wild animals. So they do what wild animals do - they eat your cats, uproot your gardens, devour your shrubs, infect you with their ticks and fleas and generally poop all over the place. All of this can be dealt with, but not in the “Fantasy” way.

A few years later the millionaires on Governor’s Island started to catch Lyme Disease from deer ticks. The overpopulated deer fell sick after they ate away the last topiaries and began starving in earnest. The no-hunting law was amended so Fish&Game could come in, shoot them all and haul them off, which they did - at public expense. The problem went away.

But the moral of the story is not that the Humans were inconvenienced - it’s that the deer deserved better. They didn’t deserve to starve and fester, and they wouldn’t have if they had been managed properly. Anti hunting laws are pushed by people who think they’re being humane, but they aren’t.

Deer Tick - cute little feller, huh?