Plan to use crossbows to kill nuisance deer in Nova Scotia town challenged by critics
Global News
Fed up with nuisance deer raiding gardens and colliding with vehicles, the Town of Truro has hired four crossbow hunters to kill up to 20 of the animals inside town limits.
Fed up with nuisance deer raiding gardens and colliding with vehicles, a town in central Nova Scotia has hired four crossbow hunters to kill up to 20 of the animals inside town limits.
“There been a lot of property damage, and it’s not just gardens,” said Mike Dolter, Truro’s chief administrative officer. “Trees are getting eaten, and they’re adapting to plants thought to be deer-resistant …. We’ve had aggressive deer, particularly in rutting season with bucks in yards, and people have been afraid to go outside.”
But a British Columbia-based group dealing with the same problem and a prominent Nova Scotia biologist both say the upcoming municipal hunt, believed to be the first of its kind in Canada, won’t solve anything.
Bob Bancroft, president of Nature Nova Scotia, says Truro’s white-tailed deer will continue to be a bother as long as local residents keep feeding them.
“When you end up with 30 animals in one backyard and people are throwing carrots out the window, it’s ridiculous,” said Bancroft, who worked for 15 years as a wildlife biologist with the provincial government.
Bancroft said the looming cull – the town prefers to call it a hunt – will be only a temporary solution, because the surviving deer will soon be joined by others that will move into town to take advantage of the easy meals provided by residents.
“It’s happening all over North America,” Bancroft said in a recent interview, referring to the fact that 300 years of industrial forestry has displaced large populations of deer from their natural habitat. “When you degrade the forest and the soils, you wind up with regeneration that is very poor in nutrition for the deer. They end up moving into private lands that are ecologically more healthy.”
Bancroft said the community of 12,000 would be better off trying to adapt to the deer, rather than killing them.