I’m sitting on my porch enjoying the warmth of supplied by our QuadraFire pellet stove. It’s amazing how much heat is produced from the burning wood pellets. It’s biomass fuel and very efficient. The pellets come in 40 pound bags and very little ash and almost no smoke result from the combustion. As I sit here this morning enjoying this, the stillness is punctuated by occasional gun shots of deer hunters nearby. I live a stones throw from the wooded area that my deer friends live in. Today my friends must run for their lives as hunters pursue them. I’m always concerned about stray bullets entering our home and wounding or killing one of us. Twenty plus years ago when I drove a school bus on country roads, I had the same concern. I suppose deer season is a good way to thin the herd, but it seems a bit barbaric nonetheless. We haven’t progressed very far it would seem. I haven’t hunted in twenty-five years. I gave away my Winchester Model 12 a few years ago. I have the dubious distinction of killing more deer with my automobile than I ever threatened when I did hunt. In the past nearly thirty years I’ve killed or maimed at least a half dozen deer while driving. My last deer cost me and my insurance carrier a little over four thousand dollars. No hunting is allowed at Mt. Irenaeus and if I owned any acreage I’d ban it also. I don’t like hitting deer with my car, but I’d do whatever I could to protect them.
2 Replies to “Deer Season”
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Here in Cincinnati we have several large parks – hundreds of acres (it seems, anyway). The deer population has gotten so high in them that they have harmed the environment, and they are malnourished. In one park, they say it can support 100 deer, but there are currently 1000 in it. So…. the police have been given permission to shoot deer, and the venison is given to local homeless shelters. Not a very pleasant situation, but it seems like a sensible approach. In our county last year there were around 700 deer-auto crashes…
Deer can be a nuisance. As I noted I’ve hit a half-dozen with cars in the past three decades. They also eat my wife’s flowers in our back yard. There number seem to be growing here too. We also have a growing bear and also coyote problem. I’m glad to see that someone is actually using the meat to feed the less fortunate. Happy Thanksgiving. 🙂 Don