Why not spray the cotton with something that tastes bad to deer?
“Why not spray the cotton with something that tastes bad to deer?”
Looks like he did, lead.
Its nice to see that there is a comprehensive wildlife management plan in the area.
Why not just leave the guy alone and let him shoot the deer?
Why not harvest the deer?
I was thinking that instead of just letting the deer rot, they could be used as food. But after reading about them eating Roundup Ready cotton, I'm not so sure anymore.
We don't have deer in our desert, but the past few years we've obtained citrus-grabbing squirrels......so I go pee at the base of the trees.
It really ticks off wifey and the local patrol cops, but they live with it.
(They're front yard trees, and I haven't quite gotten around to walling the property yet.....)
No such thing! My sister and brother-in-law have a summer home in northern michigan in a very upscale area and they have literally lost thousands of dollars of landscaping due to the dear population which can not be hunted in that resort area. As a result, he has put up motion detectors around the house which emit a high pitch sound, he has installed an electric fence around select plantings, and all this hasn't done one damn thing to deter these antlered rats.........
And for the record, here in Michigan there are over 60,000 deer/vehicle accidents a year and the numbers are increasing.........
The damn things are everywhere........Just like all those products that you can spray on your plants to deter rabbits, none of that crap works because they don't have taste buds..........
That's exactly what the cotton picker was doing!
Hot lead, 3 inches above the tops of the plants.
Seemed to be working out ok until the people thought Bambi might be there got all mushy about it. Hope some of these people get a real good close look at the deer. At twilight, as they come around a curve in the road while the deer are on their way to dinner in the cotton fields.
Lemme guess..... More fun to shoot the deer?
Ok, the problem here is he wasted the meat.
He should have been able to offer hunting priv’s to get them thinned out. Shooting them and leaving them to rot is simply wasteful.
Because spraying enough stuff that would be effective would cost several orders of magnitude more than $30 in ammo - probably more than the cost of the damage.
To farmers (justifiably), deer are merely destructive pests. You wouldn’t object to killing 40 mice in your house, so why object to a farmer killing 40 deer in his fields? Mice are cute too!
hhaaaa-haaaa-haaa-haaa-haaa
bad tasting stuff for the poor venison!!!
Why not declare open season and shoot the venison?
That will be some tasty eatin!!!
Better yet, they can be given to the needy to eat.
Win win situation.
Heck, I’ll even provide my own weapons and ammo if I can get in on the action.
Might even get to blast a few feral CATS while at it!!
Who-waa
He did, it was high velocity lead.
Deer are vermin in a pretty package.
There is nothing you can spray on a crop that will provide significant protection over the course of a growing season.
Areas that never had significant deer populations are over run now. And with the deer comes ticks and tick-borne illness.
I’m 1000 miles from Pennsylvania and we are now seeing Lyme’s disease locally. There are also confirmed cases of Tulermia in our area most likely transmitted by tick bites.
We also have confirmed cougar sightings in our area, they most likely came here hunting the deer. I have real concern for my children, pets and livestock.
City folk see a deer and say ooooooh.
I see deer making suicidal dashes in front of my car and say arrrrrrrrgh.
like a 7.62x39mm ?
Strycnine works just fine as long as they have enough water to drink.
And therein lies the rub -
There are legitimate purposes for depredation permits. Some states are pretty tight with them, requiring convincing evidence of real crop damage to issue them, while other states practically give them out for the asking without verification of other efforts to control the offending critters.
My own personal opinion on the subject - every reasonable effort should be taken prior to just the wholesale slaughter of the animals.
1 - what methods were used to dissuade the deer from damaging crops (there are mixtures that can be applied to crops to make them distasteful to deer). There are mechanical means of preventing deer damage with varying degrees of effectiveness.
2 - Does the farmer allow any legal hunting on his property? My opinion - this should be one of the first lines of defense to keep the population manageable.
3 - What are the hunting regulations in the area? If the regulations are not allowing the culling of enough of the herd to keep them in check - then the regs need changing.
4 - Did the regulatory body actually verify the damage?
And I have one additional puzzle - with all the crops in the same area (soy beans, rice, corn, milo, and other crops, it seems a bit odd that deer would choose the cotton to be their target crop. Not quite normal behavior.
and lest we forget - there are programs to feed needy families with deer taken by hunters. If a farmer has a large herd and feels that he needs to just kill 40 of them - there should have been some sort of arrangement to have them processed (no cost to the hunter or farmer) for this purpose.