Animals: Too Many Deer

First State to start restocking its forests with game was Pennsylvania, which in 1906 bought from Michigan 50 deer, added more in subsequent years. A system of State-owned refuges was developed, each refuge surrounded by an area on which hunting could be regulated by State law. Under this protection Pennsylvania’s deer multiplied rapidly. Last week, with 80,000 acres of refuges, 1,800,000 acres of hunting ground, and a herd estimated at 1,000,000, Pennsylvania had several hundred thousand deer too many.

Pennsylvania’s Game Commissioner, Dr. T. E. Winecoff, wrote about it in American Game. An annual kill of 20,000 to 25,000 deer, he said, “cannot be missed in this State. The deer herd now far exceeds the carrying power of their wild range, and—forced by hunger—they have become appallingly destructive to crops, orchards, and the plantations’ of young seedling trees set out by the Department of Forests & Waters for reforesting. And even after all their depredations on crops and orchards, large numbers of them, especially fawns, die every winter of starvation. . . . To increase game beyond the feeding possibilities of an area may not only result in . . . destruction of the game . . . but also . . . destruction for years to come of all possibilities of game restoration.”