What Happened to the Deer Lady?

Dammit. I lost track of the deer lady in Euclid who killed the fawn that was ravaging her garden. When I last noticed, people wanted to see her imprisoned with other murderers and hardened criminals.

But then I was pre-occupied with developments down in Florida, where Browns football player Donte Stallworth bought his way out of jail. He served three weeks for running over that poor devil in Miami after a night of hard drinking. After doing his time Stallworth was released on house arrest so that he could resume his workouts with a personal trainer. Stallworth negotiated a light sentence because he had the means. He turned over most of his roster bonus to the family he left widowed and fatherless. After taxes and after his agent's and his lawyer's cuts, it was about two million dollars.

The case of the lady who used her shovel to beat the fawn to death is much more complicated. How do you make restitution to the family of the fawn? How do you identify the fawn's mother or father or siblings? It's not practical. It can't be done.

It's also a joke. Let's get serious. We're allowed to set traps for pests such as rats and mice. So what's the difference? Except for it's larger size, what makes a deer so privileged?

As for mice, rats, chipmunks and squirrels, you can trap them, shoot them, poison them or sic the cat on them. No problem. You can even buy the mouse traps at Giant Eagle.

Larger rodents, such as skunks, raccoons, opossums, groundhogs and the like must be humanely trapped and released somewhere else. None of these rules apply to farmers, of course. I'm talking city rules. In Cleveland Heights, for instance, there must be a family of skunks living under every porch. A good way to get arrested there is to go around picking them off with a .22.

Dogs and cats must be humanely euthanized by a vet. Michael Vick, are you listening?

But don't you dare kill that deer you find nibbling the roses in your back yard or the PETA people will be on you like a swarm of bees.

Here's the most ironic thing. The only purpose for deer here in Ohio are to be killed. They were actually brought here for that purpose only.

A century ago there wasn't a deer left in Ohio. We were an agrarian state. The forests were cleared to make way for farms. The deer were killed to protect the crops and their predators also were wiped out. Wolves, bobcats, coyotes and cougars, who once proliferated here, were shot or poisoned to protect the livestock. Ohio was the nation's pantry.

But in the 1920's hunters pressured the state to reintroduce deer. So a herd of some 800 deer was imported from Indiana and relocated to a preserve near Columbus. I can't imagine how they drove a deer herd from Indiana to Ohio. I think only of the old expression, "Like herding cats." But they did it.

A few years later they scheduled Ohio's first deer hunting season. In the early going deer hunting was permitted every three years and then every other year. It wasn't until the early 1960's that deer hunting was permitted every year.

From 800 deer we now have 800,000 because along the way we screwed up the ecology. We brought back the deer but we did not bring back the predators. No, we do not want wolves, bears and mountain lions hanging around our garbage cans. But we don't want 800,000 deer, either. I have talked to people who experienced the terror of a deer hurtling through their windshield. You don't want that. A few years ago I interviewed a girl from Orange High School who picked glass out of her hair for a week.

You know the controversy in Solon where the city hired sharpshooters to thin the herd roaming through their yards.

The deer are here to be shot. What the lady in Euclid should have done was get hold of that fawn and ask a neighbor to drive her to Solon with it, where she could have released it to meet it's destiny. On the downside, she might have been arrested for littering.

Thanks for reading. See you tomorrow. Start saving now to buy my overpriced book next spring.