De Blasio to Bucks: It’s Snip Snip Time
I love New York. Specifically, I love New York City. Nothing against the upstaters; upstate New Yorkers as a group are smart people who understand how to address problems in a logical way. I love New York City-zens because their rationale and problem-solving methods make me laugh; chief among them Mayor Bill De Blasio who is spending $2M to perform vasectomies on whitetail deer.
Staten Island has a problem with too many whitetail deer. A population estimated at over 1000 is destroying habitat, increasing occurances of dangerous and deadly automobile accidents and increasing the spread of tick-borne illness like Lyme’s disease. But instead of allowing supervised bow hunters or even government sharpshooters to discretely cull the herd, Mayor De Blasio is taking, in his words “ the fastest, most humane approach” to whitetail deer population control.
De Blasio’s fastest, most humane approach are deer vasectomies. Really, Mr. Mayor? Deer vasectomies, and at the bargain price of $2,000,000. Respectfully, Mr. Mayor, instead of paying, $2M to perform deer vasectomies, hunters would be happy to PAY YOU for the opportunity to harvest a deer or three. And even though guns are banned in NYC, the archery boys and girls could do the job. In fact, Mr. Mayor, you could even require the venison be donated to the many homeless shelters in New York, creating a win-win situation for all concerned. The problem with this idea? It makes sense.
But then again, who am I to opine about a New York problem? I’m just a simple conservationist living in fly-over country. But perhaps faculty at Cornell University, which is in New York by the way, might have something to say about the City’s unique approach. And they do. “It's difficult for me to come up with all the reasons why this is a really stupid plan" said Cornell University ecologist Bernd Blossey. "It's an incredibly foolish idea," said John Rasweiler, a reproductive zoologist who has served on deer management groups on Long Island. "$2 million the first year? Absolute lunacy, particularly since it's not going to work."
Yet Mayor De Blasio insists the vasectomy plan "…is very consistent with, I think, the most modern thinking of how we deal with animal issues." And therein lies the real truth.
De Blasio isn’t interested in solving the deer problem on Staten Island. De Blasio is catering to the excruciatingly stupid politically correct demands of the animal rightists. Rather than reduce the herd in the most practical, humane, and fiscally responsible way; rather than feed thousands of needy citizens with healthy protein, and rather than spending $2M on a plan that is guaranteed to fail, Mayor de Blasio is cow-towing to his constituency of tree-huggers and animal rights zealots that flourishes in the bastion of liberality that is New York City.
There you have it in a nutshell: A politician sacrificing science and truth and two-million dollars for the sake of political expediency. So go ahead New York City, waste your money on a feel-good solution that isn’t. But as hundreds of deer suffer starvation, disease, and agonizing death unnecessarily, their anguish, suffering and blood is on your politically-correct hands.
