GROVELAND TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) — Some residents of rural Oakland County complain about a neighbor's wrought-iron fence that they say has impaled at least a dozen deer over the past five years.
It happened again this week, and hunter John Wareham said it shocked even him....Wareham and his wife, Joan, said they are upset with Richard Matheny's choice to leave the 4-foot-tall fence with arrow-shaped tips. The wrought-iron section covers the front of his 5-acre property, while a chain-link fence surrounds the other three sides.
Matheny said he spent $14,000 on the black fence because his neighbors wanted it to look nice. In a telephone interview Wednesday night, he said he would rather not have the fence at all but needs it to keep hunters from trespassing on his property. Read the rest.
The carnage on the fence is a bad thing, but there are several other problems that led to it happening. First, increased housing development in rural areas gives wildlife less room to move, and increases the likelihood of harmful conflicts between animals and people, however benign people's intentions are. Animals have to adapt the best they can; people often do little to adapt to their wild neighbors, to harmonize biotic community norms, as it were. I think this case represent that kind of acting without much reflection about impacts on the nonhuman world. This particular landowner is no more blameworthy than most of us, but that points to the basic problem: environmental calculations are just not part of how people generally make decsions in their daily lives. Clearly we're doing better at this than a few decades ago, but we need to do better, especially as more of us move into places where human impacts have been more limited, or at least more dispersed.
The landowner's complaint about tresspassing hunters points to another pattern of change that is helping to hang deer on his fence. Lands near metropolitan ares where hunters roamed only a few years ago are being developed or posted. This pushes some hunters to more remote public lands (whose animal populations consequently endure greater hunting pressures), and tempts others to tresspass. I don't condone tresspassing, but I do sympathize with the sense of losing someplace you habitually thought of as "your" spot. I was barred from a favorite fishing access when I was a kid because the land was sold and the new owner didn't want me walking across his property. I remonstrated with what, to my youthful mind, seemed like an unassailable argument: that I'd been fishing there for ten years. I felt like I had some claim to it. But of course he gave no credence to my pleas. As long as I lived there, I carried a grudge against the man, and snuck onto the parcel when I thought he was away.(I've since outgrown that kind of behavior!) In the case at hand, as with the deer, hunters become crowded and restive with loss of territory, and up goes the fence. It painfully kills deer that hunters might have harvested were the property still unposted. And I would bet the fence-killed deer are not going into anyone's freezer.
So there's a bigger story here than one decorative fence and a few unfortunate whitetails. Variations of this are probably playing out all over the US.
Tags:Nature; Wildlife
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