12/01/08 DEER +++, OLD MAN 0, AN UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCE

Monday, 8:00 AM. 20 degrees, wind NW, light. It is snowing lightly and the barometer predicts more. The Island is obscured.
The deer season was a complete bust and I am glad it is over. The muzzle-loader season starts today, and there is yet another, late gun deer season for antlerless deer, Dec. 11-14, but I doubt I will participate. I think the deer herd is way down, contrary to the DNR’s assessment. I think it will be back to the “bucks only” hunt. There have been too many liberal seasons, and too liberal an attitude towards predators (at least from the standpoint of the deer hunter, if not the paper companies). I got a call last night from an old friend who lives in Mountain, WI, in the Nicolet Forest, far south of Bayfield, and the talk is the same; no deer, everyone seeing coyotes, wolves, bear, bobcats, and a resident cougar in his neighborhood.
I think we are seeing the intervention here of the Law of Unintended Consequences, which pops up all the time in science, management, economics, religion…in every aspect of human existence. We gather a bit of information, analyze and act on it, and it often blows up in our face. It’s because we all, always, think we are much smarter than we actually are, and we ignore the caution signs…the traditional knowledge, customs, even the old wives tales… all the accumulated information that should engender caution.
There is also a good argument here for making decisions at the lowest possible management level, rather than in distant bureaucratic centers where it is often not facts but factions, and outside economic and political influence that sway the outcome. A case in point is all the recent criticism of Alaska’s controlling wolves by shooting them from the air. The critics don’t live there, have no economic or cultural interest in the caribou and moose herds, and have an outsider’s romantic view of what the people who actually live there should be like and do. Add to that, most moderns have a Pollyannaish view of nature, where everything is in some sort of idyllic balance. The truth is, that although nature is ultimately in balance, the pendulum swings erratically from one extreme to the other, often with drastic consequences for the human interests caught in between. A prey population becomes overabundant, a predator population catches up, depletes the prey population and itself crashes, and the cycle starts over, and in between these extremes a human population which also depends upon the prey population for sustenance or sport goes wanting. The same thing occurs with agricultural plants and their pests and diseases. This is all an oversimplification of course, but if man is to be part of nature at all it had better be as a truly intelligent manager (I fully realize this concept goes completely contrary to current politically correct thinking, which sees man as an outsider, a meddler, in nature).
So, it was deer +++, Old Man 0, and now on to other things.