The question of whether or not we should kill the wild deer in Oak Bay can never be resolved until we answer a much more profound question, that being who are we as a society?
I suspect that I’m a fairly typical Oak Bay resident, which means I was born into a culture and nurtured in a spiritual tradition that placed me outside the natural world and in dominion over it. While this detachment enables a measure of munificent prosperity, it also leaves behind a shameful legacy of poisoned water, dirty air, barren landscapes and countless numbers of dead animals who were often guilty of nothing more than being in the way of our comfort and prosperity.
If we want to imagine our society in a different more holistic way than we will find some way to live with the wild deer in our midst. If we don’t want to do that then we will extirpate the deer from our community and think ourselves the better for it.
R.A. Paterson
Oak Bay