HomeMy WebLinkAboutStein, C DEIS.pdf Deer Management Plan in Cayuga Heights and its environmental ramifications
--Comments on the DEIS--
December 1S, 2010
1 am writing as a resident of the Village of Cayuga Heights, an Ithaca native who grew up
in this community, and the mother of two young children. I have lived away from Ithaca
for many years, but chose to return to this community in large part because of the
culture and environment I value so dearly. I had hoped for my own children to
experience and enjoy a similar upbringing to mine.
This is a community with a cultural heritage characterized by sharing and coexisting
peacefully, solving problems together constructively and creatively, listening
respectfully to each others' concerns, working together with their elected officials to
solve problems and to make the community a better place in which to live, in which to
raise their children, in which to grow old.
The vast majority of people in the community who complain about deer are those who
have yards unprotected by adequate fencing to prevent the animals from browsing on
their plants. Although drastically reducing the deer population in the village might have
a positive environmental impact for gardeners without adequate fencing, it is not
guaranteed that the deer left after the culling by killing is carried out will not continue
to seek food in unprotected yards.
There are others in the village who actually enjoy the deer and feel connected to them,
especially the family groups that they see daily in their yards. They fear the trauma it
will cause them, and their children and grandchildren, to have these animals rounded
up and shot in their near vicinity.
There are also many people who fear for their safety, their children's safety, their
parents' safety, their neighbors' safety. They are experiencing fear about the use of
firearms in such a densely populated community, where children play and walk to and
from school; where elderly people take leisurely walks, where bicyclists and joggers are
out and about both morning and night, where people walk their dogs, where people go
to and from work. They believe their once safe environment will become one in which
they will no longer feel comfortable to walk, move about, and play freely in.
The Draft Environmental Impact Statement specifies that increased security measures
will be taken during the killing periods, with stepped-up police force involvement. This
only serves to prove the higher risks to safety that the killing actions will impose, and to
validate the inhabitants' fears about safety in their environment, rather than to allay
those fears.
I personally will not allow the killing of deer on my own property or the discharge of
firearms within 500 feet of my home, and I believe many, if not most, other village
residents will also disallow discharging of firearms, for whatever reason, in such close
proximity to their homes.
There are also many people, myself included, who fear the message and its
ramifications that this violence will give to their children—which is that we solve our
problems by shooting them. Although this is a prevalent credo in many circles in
America, I don't believe it is in Ithaca. And I don't believe most of us want to pass that
credo down to our children.
Rounding up deer and shooting them with bolts or bullets right in our village will
severely damage the core of the community of Ithaca, its cultural fabric, its self image
and the self images of the people residing within.
The deer-killing plan for Cayuga Heights specifies that the locations and times of the
deer shooting will not be disclosed, compounding the fears of the villagers, and indeed
the rest of Ithaca. Cayuga Heights is a part of Ithaca, and bullets, like the deer, do not
stop in their tracks when reaching the village borders.
I cannot imagine any environmental impact more threatening to a community than the
imposition of violence, trauma, fear, and distrust; imbuing its constituency with a
feeling of complete powerlessness, as the village officials carry out this violent, trauma-
causing, and highly disputed plan against the wishes of a substantial portion of its
constituency. The Cayuga Heights community will effectively be destroyed by the
imposition of an experimental and likely ineffectual annual mass slaughter in the
village.
The community has already been divided by these controversial plans. Neighbors who
congenially got along for years, for decades or more, are already polarized, forced to
either keep their opinions and feelings to themselves, or risk conflict by airing their
fears and concerns.
Catherine Stein
11 Spruce Lane
Ithaca NY