Dear Editor:
I am not alone in wondering why The Record, knowing how polarized Ann Arborites are regarding City Council’s decision to pursue a lethal cull of deer now underway, published an article (14 January) providing an exclusive platform to a pro-cull position. Surely you realize that there are at least two sides to a controversy? Perhaps The Record is implicitly revealing official U-M support for the killing of native mammals, demonized as pests, as a first resort.
Christopher Dick, an associate professor of evolutionary biology whose research on a U-M nature reserve (originally published in Bridge Magazine) is the focus on the article by Jim Erickson, is allied with pro-cull WC4EB (Washtenaw Citizens for Ecological Balance). Several members of City Council are subscribers, and it is cleared from open access and FOIAed documents that this group has exercised a disproportionate influence over our elected representatives.
In perusing the WC4EB website, one quickly realizes that it is an eclectic collection of cherry-picked articles that collectively demonize the deer, and deer alone, as paramount agents of destruction and disease! Missing from their definition of “ecological balance” is the presence and role of human beings — Washtenaw Citizens — in an ecosystem. In other words, WC4EB supporters do not see themselves as a major ecological factor; as agents of urban development and habitat loss. They have built houses in forested areas, have landscaped their yards, etc., but somehow these activities do not compromise “ecological balance.”
Dr. Dick’s support of the lethal cull is based on his observations of deer-plant relations within a highly controlled outdoor laboratory ecosystem; a special area protected from all but light human use in order to preserve, unnaturally as it were, the geological features of the region and its biodiversity. Obviously, a bounded nature reserve is not a public park. It is not a neighborhood in Ann Arbor Hills or the River District. Findings from data gathered in a controlled natural reserve cannot simply be applied to more complex and complicated multi-use ecosystems in which humans, animals and plants share the same space.
The fact remains that City Council has never commissioned a benchmark-setting, baseline survey in Ann Arbor of the relationship of wildlife to habitat loss, and systematic monitoring of the actual population of deer in different city neighborhoods. There are dozens of professionals at UM with the skills to undertake the quantitative and qualitative research necessary for informed decision-making. Instead, the Council chose to prioritize a selection of anti-deer literature from all over the U.S. supplied in large part by WC4EB, who were even invited to submit their own “report” justifying the killing of an arbitrary 100 deer in public parks as a first resort. Note too that the group of “sharpshooters” recruited to do the killing, USDA’s APHIS, has been outed in the NYT and other media for recklessness and unprofessional conduct.
I hope that when anti-cull stories appear in Bridge Magazine and other publications — there are many already — that The Record will give them equal time.
Sincerely yours,
Jennifer Robertson
Professor
Director of Graduate Studies, Center for Japanese Studies
Co-Editor, Critical Asian Studies
