Movement Watch- SPECIAL ISSUE

Contents

• DEER, CONTRACEPTION, AND ANIMAL RIGHTS
• Seize the Moment, Take a Stand
• Unwanted in Britain

DEER, CONTRACEPTION, AND ANIMAL RIGHTS

As the winter solstice drew near, and students left for their holiday breaks, officials at Swarthmore College prepared for people with guns to enter the woods surrounding the campus and kill deer. The stated reason for this attack involved an all-too-common complaint: many deer have been showing up in the woodlands, eating vegetation.

On the 18th of December, a letter I wrote appeared beside another letter by Priscilla Cohn and Tom Regan (both emeritus professors of philosophy) on page 4 of the Swarthmorean , the newspaper of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

Both letters -- mine, written on behalf of Friends of Animals -- decried the school’s consultations with the Pennsylvania Game Commission that resulted in permission to shoot the deer. But on one point, our letters diverged sharply: using contraceptive vaccines on deer as an alternative.

Animal-rights advocates oppose the killing of deer, whether the stated reason is sport or population management. We’re also aware that the game officials, as they are known, have a long history of perceiving “too many deer” -- because the idea of hordes of hooves and hungry mouths overtaking the landscape justifies issuing permits and collecting fees connected with stalking and killing these animals.

Most people don’t hunt. But many do see groups of deer and conjure up images of deflowered azaleas, or maybe just the risk of hitting a deer on the road. And sometimes -- often, in fact -- humans decide to go along with the killing of deer rather than modify their gardens, or slow down on the road, or take a route that doesn’t cut through green habitat.

Groups of deer are usually noticed in spacious parks near the edges of woods, surrounded for the most part by roads and construction of large houses or shopping malls. The deer are concentrated in some pockets, yes; but that’s to be expected when there’s nowhere else for them to go. Is there really a problem with the population of deer in specific areas, or do we just like to keep expanding our own range, and displace any beings who are minding their business around us?

As already noted, shooting deer isn’t the only method of control humans want to impose on them. A variety of contraceptives have been tested on deer, and proponents of this form of control call it an effective way to alter sexual activity and reproductive patterns of deer -- as well as elk, free-roaming horses, and even African elephants, who are pursued by helicopters when targeted. The testing of contraceptives on animals of various kinds, both in the labs and in the animals’ own territories, has become an industry in itself.

No contraceptive has been formally approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use on free-living animals in the United States. That means all uses of fertility control vaccines are carried out as experiments on animals. For years, this involved experiments with porcine zona pellucida and gonadotropin-releasing hormone on captive white-tailed deer at Pennsylvania State University. Male as well as female deer were used; in the males, results included “immunological castration, compromised libido and abnormal antler development.”^[1] Research on deer contraceptives has continued nationwide, including a study at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Montgomery County, Maryland.^[2]

Targeted animals, such as deer, aren’t the only ones being used. The contraceptive vaccine porcine zona pellucida, for example, is derived in the Montana laboratory of Jay Kilpatrick from the ovaries of pigs.^[3] It’s used to control the ponies who roam the Assateague and Chincoteague Islands, made famous in Marguerite Henry’s Misty of Chincoteague. Dogs, rabbits, and marmosets are used in zona pellucida studies; ovarian abnormalities in all of these animals have been produced in the labs.^[4]

The experiments are disturbing enough. And no matter how many experimental results appear, contraception for deer is unlikely to be welcomed by state agencies which operate as businesses, receiving revenue through hunting permits when deer populations are high. Contrary to a widespread belief in the animal-protection community, contraception is not intended as a replacement for hunting but rather as an additional form of deer control in certain regions, usually where animals live in isolated groups.

On a public question-and-answer sheet explaining an experimental contraceptive, the U.S. Department of Agriculture answers the query: “ Will [the gonadotropin-releasing hormone] GonaCon eliminate the need for hunting?”

The fact sheet answers: “ No. Contraception alone cannot reduce overabundant deer populations to healthy levels. GonaCon is a tool to be used in conjunction with other wildlife management methods.”^[5]

Moreover, animals are tracked down and forcibly injected with the vaccine – either while being restrained, or by use of agents with explosive dart guns. Unless the application is to be completely random, the darted deer must be tagged, to be later identified for a booster dose. This means capturing and sedating each deer. On many levels, contraception is an invasive, frightening approach to other beings with whom we share a territory.

Some proponents of pharmaceutical control believe it can someday be made into baits that only particular animals would ingest, thus eliminating the need for physical assaults. But any way one looks at it, controlling the fertility of free-living animals is invasive, and it can alter the social structure of the entire group.^[6] That brings us to the most important point of all: the ethical question presented when one species goes forth and controls other communities and keeps them from living freely according to their own natures.

Seize the Moment, Take a Stand

I had not thought much about the practice of testing or using contraception on free-living animals until about seven years ago, when I became familiar with the work Priscilla Feral had done on the matter over many years. I then looked up the opinion of every animal advocate and animal-protection group I could find, both in books and on the Internet. And all of them accepted the idea that humans should impose birth control on free-living animals. Only Friends of Animals stood out with a different view. Why is that?

Priscilla entered animal-rights work after being actively involved in the feminist movement. And that experience informs the view that reproductive control imposed on one group by another is a highly suspect practice, a signal of discrimination of the most fundamental kind. Rather than accept birth control of deer as a supposedly bloodless way of controlling deer, then, Friends of Animals must bring up the question of why we think we need to manipulate the reproductive systems of animals who could live free.^[7]

  With that background, let’s go to the letters that appeared in the Swarthmorean last Dec. 18 th.^[8]

Priscilla Cohn and Tom Regan didn’t challenge the key premise of the Game Commission -- that the numbers of deer living in a community at Swarthmore need to be reduced. They wrote that “killing deer is an unnecessary, anachronistic and inefficient means to protect Crum Woods” and added:

There are nonlethal means of reducing the deer herd that are effective, cheaper than constant culling, humane and not dangerous to humans. Allen Rutberg, Ph.D., one of the world’s leading experts, states: “We’re confident that our one shot PZP vaccine reduces pregnancy rates by 75-80% over at least two years.” Why not set an example and show Swarthmore students how science can make the world a more peaceful place?

But does this vaccine make the world a more peaceful place? The rights perspective points in precisely the opposite direction. Developing pharmaceutical methods of managing the reproductive systems of free-living animals is invasive, disturbing and wrong. We should not assume the right either to kill deer as individuals or to prevent their communities from existing in the future. The peaceful approach is to let them be.

Native deterrent plants and strategically positioned fences can, when put into place with care and diligence, be used respectfully. But we should n ot stalk deer, kill them, move them or usurp their territory out from under them, trap them or test contraceptives on them.

My letter, printed on the same page of the paper, explained how a permit to shoot the deer near the school did not arrive when expected from Pennsylvania’s Game Commission. Perhaps officials recalled the danger posed by suburban sharpshooters (a bullet can travel 2 - 2½ miles.) “But game officials promote hunting,” my letter observed, “and killing at Swarthmore, regardless of the stated reason, helps justify that position.”

I wrote: “Students should seize the moment, take a stand. Once shooting starts, it’s cyclical: people look away and pay the pros to shoot and shoot again. It’s up to students to press administrators to instead resolve conflict through creative thought and action.

“Porcine zona pellucida, or PZP, is not a sound alternative,” my letter continued. “It’s offered as bloodless animal control, preventing future generations from ever appearing, even as our own species spreads out ever further with our roads, malls, schools, and mansions. May the Swarthmore community press for answers that genuinely respect the autonomy and dignity of the deer, and the health of the ecology.”

This is the only topic for this issue of Movement Watch, because it is such an important animal-rights issue, and it needs serious consideration. It brings us to a deeper question than whether a certain mode of controlling nonhuman bodies and communities is bloody or bloodless, and raises key questions of domination, subordination and nonhuman genocide (literally, “killing a tribe”).

The idea that other animals are ours to manipulate as we see fit is the same idea that allows their numbers to be managed for hunting through practices such as habitat manipulation and payments to farmers for growing crops that stimulate the deer population. Perhaps the only salient difference is contraception’s aim to reduce the population and hunters’ aim to increase it.

Unwanted in Britain

In Britain, deer numbers are thought to be at their highest level for almost 1,000 years.

A recent article in the London-based Telegraph newspaper quotes the usual sectors -- “wildlife experts and farmers” -- sounding the alarm of deer “wreaking havoc in many areas, destroying woodland, crops and even gardens.”^[9]

Now, the government-funded Deer Initiative, which advises landowners on how to manage the animals, negotiates with landowners to kill deer on their property.^[10] Current killing in Britain runs at a pace of about 50,000 deer annually. But Peter Watson of the Deer Initiative insists, “We need to be culling about 500,000 deer and we are not even close to that.”

Deer have been cited for damaging nesting sites of popular birds and small mammals, and endangering British flowers such as bluebells, which provide a vital source of nectar for insects. The deer boom is connected with “a series of mild winters, tree-planting schemes and an absence of natural predators,” reports the Telegraph -- neglecting to mention that human industry and agribusiness, and our deliberate annihilation of predator animals, underlie those factors.

Wolves consume deer, but the only wolves left in Britain today are behind fences. In 1281, King Edward I ordered the death of all wolves in England. Over the next centuries, wolf extermination campaigns and bounties continued, and forests were destroyed for animal agriculture. The last wolf in Ireland was killed in 1821, and a wolf killed in Scotland in 1848 resulted in the extinction of wolves in Britain.^[11]

Some say the answer to our mistake of killing off of wolves is preventing deer from giving birth. A representative from the campaigning group Animal Concern said: “Not enough has been done to look at alternatives to lethal control, like giving deer contraceptives.”^[12]

It is time for animal advocates around the world to rethink the notion that the answer to domination is more domination. We must diligently work to foster respect for carnivorous and omnivorous animals where they still survive, and keep the biocommunity in the balance it evolved to maintain. And where we’ve made mistakes, we should resolve not to condone still worse ones. We need not accept the word of purported experts who tell us -- one way or another -- deer need us as managers.

In reality, deer expand their groups as far as shelter and food allows, not further. They will even absorb their unborn offspring into their own bodies; evolution has tuned their natural birth control that finely. Let us respect their interests in reproducing autonomously, and in living on their terms, not ours.

Footnotes