Saving the deer of Invermere

There is no paradise on earth, but ...

From Barry K. Mackay's blog on Born Free Usa.

Confession: I am not religious. I certainly don't disrespect those who are, and I appreciate the great art and architecture, philosophy and altruism religions have generated (balanced, I know, by so much that is so negative and lethal). But I am a naturalist, and as such, the wondrous tales of the dominate religion in my life where lions lie down with lambs and everyone gets along denies the reality I see each day. A world where the lion lies down with the lamb is simply not real.

So I'm not fooled by the appearances nature can present to our subjective sensitivities. When I drove into Invermere, population near 4,000, in the Columbia River Valley of the interior of British Columbia, less than a fortnight ago, I was both enchanted and worried. Animals totally fascinate me (and that includes human animals, as I'll discuss in a future blog) and I greatly enjoy seeing them, drawing and painting them (I am a wildlife artist, too), photographing them, interacting with them and being in their presence. It's just the way I am; not everyone is like that; we're all different. Diversity is, itself, as natural as a beaver dam, a robin's song or the wide-eyed innocent expression of a baby screech-owl.

But of course the beaver's dam may flood a roadway, the robin's song may awaken an exhausted shift-worker and there could be a trace of blood and fur or feathers on the beak of the baby owl. That's how it is. I get that. Still, what I saw was a community such as I could envy, where a dusky grouse strode boldly up to us, where a pileated woodpecker met us near the door of a home we visited, and where, throughout the town, mule deer wandered, on lawns, in parks, on sidewalks, crossing roads, forcing folks to drive slowly, carefully, as indeed we all always should drive.

We tend to think that wild animals "should" be afraid of us, should flee, and deer usually do, unless left alone. These deer were different, although not unlike mule deer I've seen in a few other communities I have visited in California. Indeed, I met my first mule deer when I was six years of age and she walked up to me at Mount Wilson Observatory, near Los Angeles, reached down, and chomped off the top half of the banana I was eating. Was I terrified? Nope. I ate the second half. But that's me. Remember; I like and am fascinated by animals. In the Galapagos Islands I have had a flycatcher tug at my hair for nesting material, a wild sealion play tug of war with a piece of rope and fed iguanas by hand. I have touched a wild beluga whale and had chickadees alight on my shoulder and foxes who have never met a human trot up to give me a sniff. Animals fear us, but not necessarily instinctively; we give them ample reason.

I was there with my Toronto-based colleague, Liz White, to help support a "no" vote in a referendum that asked Invermere's residents two questions. The first, was whether the community should borrow over five million dollars to pay for a new, posh arena. The other, the one we were there for, asked if the deer of Invermere should be baited to enter a large, square frame, where they would be trapped, until men arrived and collapsed the trap around them, holding the panicked, struggling animals down, until metal bolt could be driven into their brains, sometimes after many botched tries, ultimately rendering them unconscious so they could be bled from the back of a truck into a pail, until dead. That's not how the ballet was worded. It just asked if the deer should be culled. Doing that would, citizens were told, prevent the things about deer that concerned them.

We tried to get out the truth, hard to do with a population of people not knowledgeable about wildlife population dynamics, and often with both real and imagined concerns about the deer. With our colleagues, local citizens banded together as the Invermere Deer Protection Society (IDPS), we methodically canvased every part of town, telling those who would listen (some wouldn't) why culling does not work. I'll explain why culling is such a failure again in a future blog, but I doubt facts really matter to the people who supported the cull. We canvased about 1,000 houses, speaking to approximately 300 people. We encountered a ratio of about 100 to 60 opposed to the cull, but the sampling was not a scientifically valid poll. I fact, when the vote was held on November 2, only 26% agreed with us and voted "no".

Do we stop there? No. As I will explain in a future blog, the canvassing reinforced formal studies in why people act the way they do, and perform illogically. Based on figures from the cull in Cranbrook (see Saving deer, one step at a time and Was This the Dumbest Question of the Decade?) it'll cost the good folks of Invermere over $600.00 per deer removed, with, as they will discover, no significant improvement.

So we have something to build on ...a means not to ignore the concerns but to show a less costly and, most importantly, effective, suite of options. The referendum is not binding, no cull will take place quickly, but we have our work cut out. The night of the poll, within minutes of the feared outcome, we were planning, and again the next morning, within minutes of leaving for the four hour drive to the airport, we again met with IDPS members to plan for the work that must be done.

(to be continued)