Re: Loud and clear on urban deer (News, Dec. 7)
“The wretched animal heav’d forth such groans
That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat
Almost to bursting, and the big round tears
Cours’d one another down his innocent nose ...”
Is this really what we want for our “velvet friends” in Oak Bay? This passage is from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, when a hunter kills a deer in the Forest of Arden.
The CRD will never obtain consensus on the morality of killing deer, gardens or no gardens, so we might as well proceed to a humane option.
It seems that deer families stick to any site, once they feel at home. If we provide them with sufficient, appropriate urban woodland and feed them there with piles of greens and corn, they will not need the gardens of the ungulate-phobic minority. We can tranquilize and sterilize some at the same time (if they can tranquilize and move polar bears in Churchill, can’t a deer be dealt with?).
The presence of deer enlivens and beautifies our region. What do we prefer, deer and rabbits or an empty, sterile, dead city of unrelieved pavement, big-box houses and malls?
B. Julian
Saanich