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Bryon P.
Shissler
Testimony Before the
House Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee
Regarding Deer Damage and Related Issues
April 4, 2006
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Mr. Chairman and committee members, my name is Bryon
Shissler. I am a wildlife biologist, hunter, and
Director of the Ecosystem Management Project. I thank
you for the opportunity to appear before you today.
You will be hearing testimony this morning regarding the
impacts of overabundant deer on our state’s economy,
ecology, public health, and quality of life for many of
our citizens. It is a serious and well documented
problem. In the interest of using your time well I will
allow others to describe the specifics of the damage
issues while I focus on the root cause and why the
problem is so intractable.
THE PROBLEM
IS REAL
Today, there is broad agreement within the scientific
community that much of the state’s forests are in a
seriously degraded ecological condition as a result of
high deer densities and impacts (Latham et al. 2004).
A recent independent evaluation by a team of
scientists, on behalf of the Forest Certification
Council, found that deer had decimated the diversity and
sustainability of flora and fauna on the Pennsylvania
State Forest and stated that, “The current ubiquitous
understory of hay-scented fern on the majority of the
State forests bears testimony to this reality.” (Wager
et al. 2004:71).
Deer in the state’s suburban/urban communities are at
record levels and growing. Pennsylvania kills more deer
on its highways than many states kill intentionally
during their hunting seasons. We lead the country in new
cases of Lyme disease and our farmers, forest landowners
and gardeners remain challenged by deer damage.
In a news release just issued last week by the PGC it
was stated that visitors to State Game Land 106 in Berks
County would be able to witness a new type of forest
habitat that has been provided for all wildlife species
(PGC News Release Number #36-06, unpublished report,
Harrisburg, PA, 1997). The news release states that,
"Tree seedling growth was struggling to reforest the
site prior to installation of a fence on April 1, 2001.
But, for the last five growing seasons, this fence has
protected trees, shrubs and planted conifers from
repeated browsing by white-tailed deer. "With the aid of
the fence, oak, maple, hickory, spruce, black gum, witch
hazel and other trees and shrubs have grown on this
site. The result is that numerous small trees have
grown beyond the reach of the deer. Now is the time to
remove the fence so that all wildlife can benefit from
this habitat." The commission paid $5,625 to purchase
and erect the deer exclosure.
I would ask how complacent have we become on this issue
when it is acceptable for the state wildlife agency to
suggest success in protecting trees and shrubs from
repeated deer browsing by building a fence to get
successful regeneration, at a cost of nearly $250/acre
in a forest which for millennia regenerated on its own
without deer fence? To most anyone from outside of the
state, what we have allowed to happen is beyond
understanding and rational behavior.
THE PROBLEM
IS NOT NEW
If you are over the age of 30 you know that this is not
the first time this issue has been raised. However few
of us can remember the first time - almost 90 years
ago.
In
1917 Joseph Kalbfus, the Pennsylvania Game
Commission’s first Executive Director said that
the biologist who tries to manage
Pennsylvania’s white-tailed deer herd based more
on science and less on social pressures was in
for a fight. “Thank God I won’t be in
charge of this work 10 years from now because
someone is going to have hell to pay,” Kalbfus
said (Frye in press).
In
1935 Richard Gerstell was a Yale graduate and
one of the Game Commission’s first full-time
wildlife managers. He said the state had too
many deer for the available habitat (Frye in
press).
In
1940, conservationist John M. Phillips wrote in
the commission’s own magazine, the Game News,
that the Commission, by its own count, lost
75 to 90 percent of the trees, and shrubs it
planted to ravenous deer looking for something
to eat because there were simply too many for
the habitat to support (Frye in press).
In
September 1944 Ross L. Leffler, President of the
Game Commission, wrote, in the Game News that
hunters were forcing the Game Commission to
manage for too many deer, to the detriment of
deer, hunters and everything else (Frye in
press).
In
the early 1950’s Robert McDowell, Chief of the
Game Commission’s Wildlife Research Division,
wrote that deer were starving because the
herd had been allowed to grow out of proportion
to the amount of feed available (Frye in
press).
In
the late 1950’s Game Commission biologist Roger
Latham warned that the agency had to get
control of the deer herd once and for all. He
also warned, that hunters might not support such
an effort (Frye in press).
In
the 1970’s Game Commission turkey biologist
Gerry Wunz began referring to deer as mountain
maggots because of the devastating consequences
of overabundant deer on forest wildlife habitat.
In
2000, Gary Alt, the Supervisor of the
Pennsylvania Game Commission’s Deer Management
Section, stated that carrying more deer than
the land could support was the biggest mistake
in the history of wildlife management and
constituted malpractice on the part of the Game
Commission.
As
you may know, Dr. Alt resigned four years later
because he could not fix the challenge of
overabundant deer or meet the agency’s mission
statement because the current system simply
would not allow it.
THE PROBLEM
WAS NOT UNFORESEEN
Over 100 years ago, Dr. Kalbfus, the Commission’s first
Executive Director balked at the idea of funding the
state wildlife agency with a hunting license. Kalbfus
was concerned that funding the agency through hunting
license sales would skew the agency away from its
original broad responsibility to manage, conserve and
protect all the state’s wildlife, on behalf of all its
people. He foresaw that if wildlife conservation
depended solely on hunter’s dollars, they could, and
would, leverage the Commission to require that the land
produce more game at the expense of other natural
resources and stakeholders (Madson 1993). Time and
experience has proven him correct.
NOT BAD
PEOPLE BUT A FLAWED SYSTEM
We are not suggesting that the people within the Game
Commission or hunters are bad people. We would suggest
that we have a system designed to fail the interests of
the majority of our citizens and our commonly held
natural resources. The existing system uses the deer
resource as a crop for hunters, 94% of whom hunt deer.
It is these hunters who pay the bills for the
Pennsylvania Game Commission and so obligate
Commissioners to respond to their desire to maintain
more deer than the habitat can support. Deer hunter
satisfaction is primarily driven by what hunters see
while in the field (Langenau 1981) and hunters often
want to see more deer than the land can sustain
resulting in their promotion of, “counter-productive,
self-serving agendas” (Woolf and Roseberry 1998). You
cannot, as the PGC mission statement suggests, protect,
preserve, and enhance all the wildlife and their
habitats for all the people, including current and
future generations, if the agency is funded, directed,
and staffed exclusively by a special interest group that
makes up less than 8% of the state’s population and has
as its focus primarily white-tailed deer.
If your community was to put the local bowling league in
charge of funding, directing, and staffing your local
recreation commission, we would submit that in 50 years
there would be more bowling alleys than swimming pools,
baseball fields or tennis courts. This would not make
your bowlers bad people but it would establish a system
designed to fail most of the people in your community
and explains why the PGC’s mission statement has
frequently been misinterpreted, ignored or administered
improperly as a result of challenges built into the
organizational structure and funding systems of the
commission.
Today the PGC spends less than 10% of its budget on
nongame, endangered and threatened species programs and
habitat. The agency remains primarily a game management
organization with a species rather than an ecosystem
management focus (Latham et al. 2004). Managing deer
from an ecosystem perspective would be far more complex
than the deer management programs we are familiar with
today and would require scientists from other fields
such as botany, forest ecology, and silviculture, none
of which the agency employs today (Latham et al. 2004).
WHERE IS THE
SCIENCE
The Pennsylvania Game Commission repeatedly refers to
its deer management program as science-based yet refuses
to share that science or the data that supports it with
the public or scientific community. The PGC deer
management program lacks transparency, peer reviewed
science, public trust and evidence of effectiveness in
meeting their own mission statement. I doubt anyone in
this room, including those that represent the Game
Commission, can explain to us, using real numbers, how
the current deer program works or the science upon which
it is based.
Many hunters, Game Commission
officials, DCNR employees and a variety of other
“authorities” have made statements about deer numbers
declining, evidence of recovery and progress in seeing
this issue resolved. Yet not one government agency or
other group has provided any credible quantitative,
science-based evidence of habitat recovery, or deer herd
reductions resulting in a lessening of forest or
agricultural damage, the threat of Lyme disease, deer
vehicle collisions or ornamental damage. Deer management
remains within in the realm of opinions and popularized
techniques like infrared surveys and pellet counts but
outside of peer-reviewed science.
We will need to greatly expand the
skill mix of scientists within the wildlife agency if
the agency’s goal is to ensure long-term sustainability
of wildlife species and their habitat. We will need to
transition away from traditional deer management
concepts (single-species management) and move toward
adopting ecosystem management principles (Christensen et
al. 1996). Managing deer from an ecosystem perspective
would be far more complex than the deer management
programs we are familiar with today and would require
scientists from other fields such as botany, forest
ecology, and silviculture (Latham et al. 2004).
THE PROBLEM
CANNOT BE FIXED WITHIN THE EXISTING SYSTEM
Albert Einstein once said that the definition of
insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and
expecting a different result. There is no better quote
to summarize the deer overabundance problem in
Pennsylvania. The problem has existed for more than
half a century (Latham 1950, Tillett 1963), methods have
been proposed (e.g., citizen task forces), symposia have
been held (McAninch 1995, McShea 1997), and promise
after promise has been made. And yet the problem still
exists and is getting worse as habitats continue to
degrade (Latham et al. 2004). Increasing the challenge
is the decline in hunter numbers. The PGC own hunter
participation model suggested that hunter numbers will
decline by as much as 25% by 2012 and by 50% by 2017.
They declined last year alone by more than over 5%.
As a solution hunting license increases, species hunting
stamps and a conservation stamp designed to create new
revenue have been proposed. Such efforts will perpetuate
and prolong the problem but cannot solve it. So long as
wildlife policies are administered to meet the demands
of hunters to a greater extent than meeting the needs
for all the people, often to the detriment of the
habitat, the deer and, ironically, to the long-term
interests of the hunters themselves, this problem will
continue as it has for decades. This fundamental flaw
needs to be corrected if the agency has a chance to
solve the deer overabundance problem. As Dr. Kalbfus
feared, hunters because, “they pay the bills,” are and
will remain the most important stakeholders. This
supports the century-old concern of Kalbfus that the
agency may view money generated by hunters as being more
critical to their organizational survival than the
natural resources they are charged to manage.
Experience has shown that it is difficult to design a
science-based deer program that will serve a broad
public interest, both today and in the future under this
system. It may be unrealistic to believe that one
particular stakeholder would be willing to pay for
services that they believe are counter to their best
interest while benefiting other stakeholders. This may
be perceived as a self-serving agenda of sportsman (Woolf
and Roseberry 1998) but it is not inconsistent with
other human behavior in the context of the tragedy of
the commons.
To solve the overabundant deer problem, we must reduce
deer densities to levels that are compatible with the
aforementioned agency mission statement. To do so we
believe our wildlife agency will need to be funded by
all the people if the intent is to design a deer
management program that will meet a broad public
interest. We need to move away from the model that
relies almost exclusively on hunters to fund the agency
(Heberlein 1991), particularly when conservation issues
seem to be continuously growing and expanding into new
areas, many of which are generally unrelated to hunting,
such as wildlife diseases and human health (Wobeser and
Bollinger 2002, Fischer et al. 2002, McLean 2002,
Williams et al. 2002).
WHAT WE NEED
We
need an urban deer management program that
includes progressive tools such as those
generated from the public comments at the eight
seminars sponsored by over 65 Pennsylvania
organizations.
We
need to improve wildlife conservation funding.
If we are to have a wildlife conservation agency
that manages all the wildlife for all the people
then all the people need to contribute rather
than just hunters.
We
need a wildlife agency that represents all the
people not just deer hunters. One option to
achieve this goal would be to broaden the
current PGC Board of Directors from being
exclusively hunters to include a representative
selected by residential communities, forest
landowners, agriculture,
environmental/conservation NGO’s, etc.
We
need a publicly transparent deer management
program that tells the public what it is trying
to achieve, how and what is being measured, and
how we know when the program is successful. We
need a program that is open to scientific peer
review and which makes the data upon which
decisions are made public.
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