The Bad Faith, and Bad Arguments, of the Deer Killers of Weston

          One thing at least is clear about the debate over the deer problem in Weston:  the proponents of killing the deer have so far presented arguments so weak that they would not pass muster in an introductory philosophy class.

            I say this as someone who teaches ethics at the college level, who is accustomed to seeing bad arguments offered up by my students in support of ethically dubious propositions.  Students argue that because men have dominated women for generations, it must therefore be “natural” for them to continue to do so.  Others say that it is wrong for us to criticize the Nazis, because everybody is entitled to their opinion­ (and who are we to judge?).  One student I had this year suggested that humans we deem “incompetent”—such as infants, the mentally disabled, or the insane—ought to be denied human and civil rights, on grounds that they are incapable of understanding them.

            Bad arguments of this sort, which are essentially used to justify inequality and violence, are troubling when they appear in a philosophy classroom.  But they are far more troubling when they get advanced in the public arena by people in positions of authority and influence.  In such cases, they may become a threat to liberty--either to our own liberty, or to the liberty of others. 

            Such is the case today in the Town of Weston, where town officials are making fallacious arguments to justify the massacre of the native deer who live there.

            It may sound improbable, but listening to Weston’s public officials solemnly tell their citizens that they have “no choice” but to engage in a massacre of the native deer population, I have been reminded of the spurious debate over “WMD” or Weapons of Mass Destruction during the Bush Administration.  As readers will recall, in early 2003 the Bush Administration conducted a full-court press in the media to convince the American public of the necessity and justice of a US invasion of Iraq.  Government officials began by darkly hinting at a supposed link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda.  When critics observed that Saddam Hussein hated Al-Qaeda, officials instead turned the public's gaze to Iraq’s supposed chemical weapons arsenal.  

             After the invasion, when no WMD were found, the same officials changed the terms of debate yet again, pointing to Saddam Hussein’s terrible human rights record and the Iraqi people’s yearning for freedom--a yearning that the US had previously been content to ignore for decades, during its alliance with Iraq against Iran—as justification for the war.  In fact, there was no evidence that Iraq had been involved in the 9-11 attacks, or that it posed the slightest threat to the United States or its allies.  But the Bush people were determined to go to war:  there was simply no stopping them.  As a result, over 100,000 civilian were killed, and more than half a million people were maimed and injured.

            The question of what policies the Town of Weston should adopt toward the deer who live there will naturally seem as remote from national debates over our foreign policy as Weston is distant from the Middle East.  Yet as in the debate preceding the US invasion of Iraq, the question before the people of this community is whether or not to authorize mass violence against another, vulnerable population.  And as in that earlier debate, we find advocates for violence introducing a raft of fraudulent “reasons” for why violence is unavoidable and just.  While none of these arguments in fact stands up under scrutiny, when presented to the public en masse, as a bundle, they achieve their intended effect of intimidating and confusing the citizenry.

            The official rationale for why the deer must be killed is a moving target, if my reader will pardon the pun.  The deer must be killed, town officials say, because they carry ticks infected with Lyme Disease.  Or because people run them down with cars.  Or because they munch on the expensive landscaping of the town’s residents.  Or because they’re denuding the forest’s undergrowth.  The deer must be killed to save them the bother of starving to death. Killing the deer is natural (Native peoples killed deer too).  Killing the deer is morally permissible because “death is part of life.”  Killing and eating deer is a good alternative to eating animals raised far away on factory farms.  And besides, deer are delicious! 

             Meanwhile, officials claim, contraception won’t work.  Or it won’t work well enough.  Or it is too expensive.  Or it would be hard to find enough volunteers to do the darting.  Conservation Commission member Brian Donahue goes so far as to suggest that for deer contraception to work in Weston, the town would first have to dart all 30 million deer extant throughout the entire US.  Weston would need to find “an army of a few million [sic] dedicated volunteers” to do the work.  That’s right:  a “few million” volunteers to dart an estimated 200-300 deer living in and around Weston. 

            As in a shell game, pro-hunting advocates continually shift around the terms of the debate.  When one argument fails or is shown to be built on poor foundations, they simply introduce another.  After a Conservation Committee meeting last month, for example, when I told the chair of that Commission that I could see no ethical justification at all for killing the deer, she replied that the deer had to be killed to save them from starvation.  However, when I pointed out that one of the “ringers” brought in by the Commission to bolster the pro-hunting position, Professor John McDonald, of Westfield State University, had in fact just that evening publically dismissed talk of deer starvation as a “myth”—deer won’t starve at even ten times the population density of Weston’s existing deer population—she ignored my remark.  Instead, she pointed triumphantly at my shoes and said, “You wear leather!”, as though she had caught me out on some contradiction in my argument.  (In fact, I wear synthetics, not leather.)  When I then noted that previous studies showed darting the deer to be about as effective as hunting them, she shifted ground again, claiming that every contraceptive dart requires the killing of a pig in order to extract the pig’s ovum for use in the serum.  So for every deer saved, she said, a pig would be killed, cancelling out the “savings” of deer lives.  (In fact, the small numbers of pig ova are removed from a small handful of the tens of millions of pigs who have already been killed in the meat industry.)  Finally, when I pointed out that members of the Commission were contradicting themselves, claiming one moment TINA (There Is No Alternative), then saying that nonviolent alternatives were simply too burdensome, she said nothing at all.

            This last point is worth attending to.  Weston’s residents have been given the impression by their elected representatives’ that mass violence is the only solution to the deer problem.  Yet a close reading of the Selectmen’s own statements suggests that even they don’t believe that.  Selectman Ed Coburn, for example, writing in the Weston Town Crier, bemoaned “the high cost, logistical hurdles...and unproven effectiveness” of nonviolent alternatives. There are other possible ways to control the deer population, in other words, but the town finds them inconvenient.

            In fact, there are no sound scientific reasons for preferring hunting over nonviolent mechanisms.  But as Dr. Allen Rutberg of Tufts University pointed out at the Conservation Commission hearing I attended, local debates about rising deer populations are not really over the science at all, but over community values.  More specifically, they are debates over the value of nonhuman life and over the question of whether, or under what circumstances, it is ever ethical to inflict violence against other sentient beings. 

            How much should we value the lives of deer and other beings?  How much inconvenience or expense should we endure, in order to spare them death and suffering at our hands?  These are important moral questions.  But the pro-hunting side has made it difficult to answer them by muddying the discussion with a variety of thoroughly specious and misleading arguments.  Here are a few of them:

1.   Killing the deer is natural. 

            Members of Weston’s Board of Selectmen and Conservation Commission have repeatedly said that it is natural for us to kill deer, and that it is natural for deer to die a violent death.  Commission member Brian Donahue, a professor at Brandeis University, for example, has described killing the deer as a “natural and humane relationship between deer and people”,  writing that, “[f]or people to kill significant numbers of deer is deeply natural,” part of our “natural role” on the earth. 

            As much as I respect Professor Donahue’s expertise as an environmental historian, his meditations on ethics are rubbish.  Killing deer is no more “natural” for human beings than listening to iPods, eating meat (or abstaining from meat), surfing the internet, sending drones to kill villagers in Afghanistan, or putting on shoes in the morning.  In other words, it is no more “natural” than any other cultural practice we engage in.  Killing deer is something that we choose to do, or choose not to do.  As a community, Weston can choose to view the deer with compassion, respecting them as autonomous beings with their own interests and form of life.  Or it can choose to wage war against them, to mutilate and kill them, because it serves some perceived human interest to do so.  Either way, in making its choice, the town defines itself and its values.  But in neither case can pro- and anti-deer factions lay claim to some mythical conception of what constitutes our "natural" relations with deer as a way of legitimating their position.

             In any event, just as there is nothing unnatural about having friendly, curious deer around, there is also nothing “natural” about grown men in camo tramping off into the woods equipped with powerful, thousand-dollar compound bows with metal-injection molded triggers, not to mention a GPS device, a topo map, and a thermos of Newman’s Own Coffee freshly brewed from Starbucks. 

            But surely killing deer is natural, Donahue and other town officials say.  As "proof," they cite the fact that Native peoples once hunted deer for thousands of years.  However, the fact that humans may have engaged in a particular practice for long periods of time in the past tells us nothing whatsoever about the moral acceptability of that practice, whether in the past or present. For thousands of years, some Native peoples also tortured and killed members of other human communities.  Is Weston therefore morally entitled to stage raiding parties on the people of Lincoln and Concord, killing the men and enslaving the women?  That must be “natural” too, because humans have been killing and enslaving one other for generations.

            In fact, human practices and norms change over time, and it is up to us to pick and choose among them, and to provide sound ethical reasons for our choices.  As late as the mid-twentieth century, cetaceans were viewed as “brutes” and “monsters” entirely deserving of the agonizing deaths we meted out to them on the high seas.  Human beings butchered hundreds of thousands of whales.  We killed mother whales, then killed the babies.  We wiped out so many that many whale species remain on the brink of extinction  to this day.  Today, however, the hunting of whales has been prohibited by most of the world community. 

             Are we to object to such prohibitions, on grounds that we are whales' "natural predators," and that an existentially fulfilled whale is a dead one?  Shall we say that it is "unnatural" for scientists to communicate with humpbacks, or to strike up friendships (as they have) with "wild" orcas?

            Members of the Conservation Commission seem wedded to a purely fictional ideal of an unsullied Nature.  To choose not to kill the deer, Brian Donahue writes, would amount to choosing to “live in a zoo.” Darting the deer will make them more “tame,” and so cause them to lose their “natural” status as “wild” animals.  “In time,” Donahue warns, “they will walk right up to us and our children, because they do not fear us.”  In an odd but telling inversion of the true power dynamics between human animals and all the rest, Donahue expresses the further anxiety that it is we who will end up living in a “zoo.” stared at by curious deer the way we now imprison and gawk at other animals behind the bars of a zoo.  It is we who will become  domesticated--a prospect that seems to chafe against the internalized "Wild Man" self-image that Professor Donahue and other hunters seem to cling to.  Don’t fence me in!  What could be more threatening, in this context, than a group of compassionate, principled women—Deer Friends—resisting the drumbeat of war against the deer?

            The pro-hunting contingent, mostly men, have thus argued that it would be far better for the deer to be shot to death, and to live in fear of us, than for them to live alongside us peacefully.  To make this case, however, they effectively collapse the enormous complexity and rich diversity of interspecies relations and experiences into the single relationship of predator and prey.  But we know from myriad encounters between human beings and members of other species (across diverse cultural contexts) that relations of mutuality, symbiosis, and even friendship flourish across species boundaries.  The distinction Donahue wishes to draw, then, between “tame” deer and “wild” deer is in fact based entirely on an anthropocentric projection of Romantic conceptions onto the deer themselves--onto beings, that is, who in no way see or experience themselves or their world through a frame of species purity and contamination.

             Professor Donahue insists that to shoot deer to death is both more “natural” and less drastic than “to meddle in the reproductive lives of these animals.”  However, as Huck Finn would say, that is just talk.  This is not about "meddling."  Were we genuinely interested as a society in not meddling with the lives of the millions of animals who live alongside us—the deer, raccoons, coyotes, mice, rabbits, foxes, bluejays, sparrows, and so on—we would stop destroying their habitat in order to put in new strip malls, new McMansions, new roads and highways.  We would not poison them with arsenic and nerve agents.  Nor would we continue to dust our lush lawns and gardens with toxic pesticides and herbicides.  Similarly, if members of the Conservation Commimssion were genuinely concerned about the welfare of deer and other animals, they would speak out against further human encroachment onto animal habitat. They would lobby our state representatives to do a better job mitigating the lethal risk posed by our highways and roadways to the millions of wild and domesticated animals who live in our state, e.g. by creating natural overpasses for wildlife, so that they might cross our dangerous roadways safely. 

            In point of fact, however, when critics of Weston's deer hunting policy point out that, perhaps, we should consider changing our own behavior to mitigate the risk of Lyme Disease, car collisions with deer, and so on, they are dismissed by hunting advocates as being “impractical” and utopian.  In fact, as the scientists consulted by the Commission admitted last month, the so-called deer problem is a human problem.  Deer population densities are rising because we have destroyed the deer's predators and either destroyed or fragmented much of their natural habitat.  Yet it is for our sins, not theirs, that they must apparently die:  the burden of our heedless civilization and destructive way of life is always made to fall on the other species, whose lives we hold in secret contempt.

2.  Killing the deer is a kindness—to them. 

             Conservation Commission chair Laurie Bent owns that she finds “animal death troubling” and writes that we as a society “insulate ourselves from death."  But this is to mystify what is at stake in this debate.  We are not in fact talking about "death," we are talking about intentional violence and killing.  Is death a part of life?  By all means.  However, if someone comes at me with an ax, with the cheerful reminder that “Death is part of life!”, I will still run as fast and as far as I can in the opposite direction.

            Alas, it is not enough for the would-be deer killers that the deer should die at our hands—they must also be shown to consent to their own slaughter.  Deer choose to be shot, rather than to be subjected to the humiliation of having their reproductive lives tampered with.  Or rather, they would make such a choice were they capable of making it.  Here, however, the thoughtful reader might ask herself whether, given the choice, she would rather be darted with a contraceptive or to be shot with an arrow at point blank range through the spleen, the liver, the stomach, the eye, etc.  We might perform the same thought experience on our own cat or dog:  would our companion animal be “better off” being shot to death, or to be spayed or neutered?  The Humane Society believes that it is far more humane to capture and sterilize feral cats than to shoot them to death or put them in gas chambers.  Perhaps they are wrong.  Perhaps we should simply kill them all and eat them.  After all, cat is served as a delicacy in Asia.

            Deer and other mammals have evolved the same basic physiology, the same panoply of senses and emotions, the same complex nervous system, that we have. They therefore experience trauma in much the same ways that we do. Why then is killing them not to be considered a significant moral issue?

            Hunting advocates claim that their motivation for maiming and killing the deer is purely benignant and disinterested--that it comes out of a place of wanting to show “respect” and “compassion” for them.  The best way to show that we are a “true friend of the species,” Professor Donahue writes, is to kill them.  Why?  Because we prevent them from suffering a worse fate.  As Selectman Ed Coburn informs us, “Deer...do not die peacefully in their old age, surrounded by loved ones.”  Instead, “[f]or the most part, deer are killed by predators, traumatic injury from a car or truck, starvation, or hunters.”  In a similar vein, Conservation Commission chair Bent suggests that killing the deer will be a mercy, to save them from “a public, dangerous, traumatic, gruesome, expensive and pointless death by car.”  

            In other words, the deer are literally better off dead than alive.  Because when they are finally dead, at least they cannot suffer the inconveniences of living.

            Perversely, pro-hunting advocates have repeatedly argued that killing the deer helps the deer fulfill their sole existential life purpose, which is to be killed.  Their “natural condition,” writes Mr. Donahue, is “to meet a violent end.”  The same might be said of every being on the earth, including many members of Homo sapiens.  We too suffer and die, sometimes alone, as in nursing homes.  We die violently--in car accidents, in IED and drone attacks, at the hands of violent boyfriends and husbands (if we are women).   We may even die, like the deer, of starvation and preventable disease, if we live in the Third World.  And like deer, we too are vectors for disease (and far worse, more lethal diseases than those borne by ticks and white-footed mice).  We too may become prey in particular contexts (try swimming with Oceanic Whitetip sharks, or Amazonian crocodiles).  We too damage the ecosystem.  Of all the species guilty of the sin of overpopulation and overconsumption of resources, only ours poses a universal lethal threat to all of the other species.

            Should we not also be spared the bother of living, or the trauma of dying, like the deer?  Would it not be more “merciful” to line everyone up at a young age and "cull" them, to prevent them the later sorrows and disappointments of life?  Wouldn't that be better for the environment, too?

            In other words, the fact that we are suffering, imperfect beings can in no way serve as moral justification for the liquidation of particular individuals.  And that is as true of our attitude toward members of Odocoileus virginianus as it is toward members of Homo sapiens. The fact that children in war zones are at a higher risk of dying a violent death does not mean that I am entitled to kill them.  The fact that my neighbor has just learned that he has terminal cancer does not give me the right to shoot him through the head with an arrow, in order to spare him future suffering.  And so on.

            The Buddha taught that life itself is suffering.  The question is, what should we do with that knowledge?  Is the "take-away" that we should go out and add to the terror and violence of the world, in the name of easing other beings of the trouble of living?  Or should we approach other living beings with an attitude of compassionate and ahimsa, the principle of non-harm, as the Buddhists recommend? 

3.  Deer are “fungible”:  the lives of individual deer can be swapped for other deer lives, because they’re all the same.

            Conservation Commission chair Bent has written that she sees no problem with massacring deer so long as “the species is plentiful.”  Her remark reminded me of the famous scene in the documentary, Hearts and Minds, about the Vietnam War, in which Gen. William Westmoreland (US commander in charge of US forces in Southeast Asia), explains that “the Oriental does not value life” the way do, because “life is plentiful, life is cheap,” for people in the Orient.  The reality of course was rather the opposite:  it was American leaders who viewed Asian life as plentiful and cheap, which is what enabled them to exterminate 2-3 million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians without losing sleep over it.  In a similar way, hunters, wildlife agency officials, and some environmentalists continue to believe that so long as a "population" survives or thrives, the lives and deaths of specific individuals within that population have no existential or moral weight.

            All of the arguments I have heard so far from the pro-hunting side in fact reduce individual deer to the abstract category of “deer,” as if every deer was interchangeable with every other.  We know from history, however, that the surest way to exterminate a defenseless population, whether of human persons or nonhuman ones, is to begin first by obliterating all traces of the individual--to suppress their identity as an individual beneath the rubric of an abstract category.  When Hitler wanted to prepare the way for the liquidation of European Jewry, he commissioned Goebbels to produce documentaries like The Eternal Jew, which reinforced existing stereotypes of Jews as identical to one another.  There were no individual Jews, only "the Jew" as such.  In the same way, we are told that there are not individual deer, only "the deer" in the abstract, as a timeless, faceless, eternal concept.

            In fact, though, we know from the science of cognitive ethology that deer are no less individuals than are are chimpanzees, hawks, cetaceans--or members of Homo sapiens.  (People who live with cats or dogs will have no trouble appreciating the fact that every animal is unique and has its own personality.) To suggest that the deer are “all the same" is therefore willfully to ignore an emerging scientific consensus about the individuation of sentient beings.  Every deer on the contrary has its own memories, preferences, particular relations with other deer (and with members of other species), its own emotions. The naturalist Henry Beston, a Massachusetts native, perhaps put the matter best a century ago when he wrote:

 "We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals.  Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion.  We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves.   And therein do we err.  For the animal shall not be measured by man.  In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.  They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."

4.  Killing and eating the deer is preferable to eating animals who were factory farmed.

            Brian Donahue writes that killing the deer “provides excellent venison” which “should make all us locavores happy.”  Laurie Bent, similarly, writes that killing the deer will provide “local” meat for the hunters “and their families” (it’s always the poignant “for their families”—apparently there are no single hunters).  They and others hold that eating locally slain deer is morally and aesthetically superior to eating the flesh from factory-farms shipped in from Iowa. 

            This whole line of argument, however, rests on a false dilemma:  either Weston’s residents participate in the viciousness of factory farming, or they eat the deer slain by bow hunters.  Obviously, though, there is a third alternative:  the hunters could refrain from eating animals at all, which would not only be better for the animals themselves--and for the global ecosystem--but for their own health too. In any event, the entire issue is a red herring.  Weston’s 11,000 meat-eating residents could hardly survive year to year (or week to week) by apportioning the flesh from the 100 or so individual deer being targeted by the town for execution. Nor will killing the deer strike a blow against factory farming.  It will only leave the deer of Weston dead.  Bow hunters are not going to stop eating at McDonalds or buying frozen Tyson chickens from Stop and Shop, simply because they managed to bring down a deer in Weston.

            Why then do so many on the pro-hunting side of this debate continue to bring up their own food preferences?  Brian Donahue has written in the Weston Town Crier that he personally raises and kills dozens of animals of various species, including pigs, chickens, and cows.  "I have grown familiar with the uneasy paradox of caring for these animals,” and then killing them, he writes.  Here I will leave it to the reader to meditate on the “paradox” of killing beings who trust and depend upon you, and to others to explain, for Professor Donahue's benefit, the difference between genuinely “caring” for others, and slitting their throats and watching them struggle and bleed to death in the dirt.  Suffice it to say, however, that the fact that we treat one group of animals brutally, in a way that shows contempt for their love of life, is in itself no brief for treating some other group of beings with equivalent brutality. 

            In the same vein of irrelevancy, Ms. Bent, chair of the Conservation Commission, notes that eating deer is no different than “eating beef from a cow.”  But she fails to understand the significance of her own argument.  Bent observes that while “it is in our nature to limit our empathy to creatures near us,” in fact “we should extend our empathetic awareness to those other creatures who die for us...far away.”  This is an admirable position to take.  But her reasoning leads to the opposite conclusion than the one she believes she is making.  For what she has shown is why we ought to take the interests of cows and other farmed animals seriously, not why we are entitled to disregard the interests of deer.

5.  The deer have no business being here.

            Finally, I would like to address the pervasive attitude, in Weston and other suburban communities, that the deer have no business being in our backyards.

            Listening to Dr. Sam Telford of Tufts University, one of the experts brought in by the Conservation Commission to make the case for hunting, I was haunted by a particular slide he showed of circles drawn on a map of Weston, each depicting a zone where deer now freely roam.  The way to deal with these “culprits” (as Dr. Telford termed them), was to force the deer into narrower and narrower circles, narrower rings of exclusion.  Watching his chilling presentation, I could not help thinking of the American state’s policies towards the Native peoples:  first, wipe them out, then crowd the survivors onto reservations, bantustans, where they can be properly “controlled” and be put out of sight.

            But it is one thing to raise legitimate public health concerns about the spread of Lyme Disease, or about ways to mitigate the dangers to humans and deer from collisions, and another to present the deer as an invading horde of enemies or marauders who are threatening Weston's traditional way of life.  The deer, after all, were here first.  We are the interlopers, not they.  The hunting lobby makes much of the fact that humans have hunted deer in North America for 10,000 years.  But they don't mention that the deer lived and thrived here for millions of years, before we humans showed up.  Somehow, the deer got along just fine for all that time without our "harvesting" them.  

            In sum, the deer have a right to live here.  They have as much a right to live here, as free as possible from our interference and violent harm, as we do.  Such a notion may seem novel to members of the Conservation Commission, who have grown accustomed to seeing other species merely as “pests."  But it is worth noting that the first European inhabitants here took a broader view of things.  Few in Massachusetts today are aware of the fact that the first bill of rights in North America was signed into law right here in the Commonwealth, in 1641.  And fewer still are aware that it explicitly acknowledged the natural “liberties” (rights) of “the Bruite Creature” alongside the liberties of women, children, and strangers (i.e. non-Puritan Christians and visitors to the Colony).  

            If the Bay Colonists concluded that the other animals had a right to “natural libertie,” perhaps it was because of their keen sense of their own status as newly arrived interlopers.  Plimoth Plantation had been established only twenty years earlier.  By contrast, the animals had thrived in New England's woods, fields, and waterways for eons.

            To conclude:  Weston’s town officials are to be commended for wanting to protect the town’s citizens from perceived threats and dangers.  But I fear that their conception of the citizenry is too narrow.  The deer are, if not citizens, then denizens or co-inhabitants of this land.  As I have said, they have as much a right to live and flourish in Massachusetts as we do.  But I will go even further than that, to say that they have a right to the protective powers of the state.  As Gandhi who observed, "A nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members."  And who is more vulnerable in our society today than the other animals?  For unlike human persons, who can appeal for succor to the laws of the Commonwealth for protection, they are entirely at our mercy.  It is precisely they who most need the protection of the state.  Town officials in Weston, and elsewhere, therefore have a duty to secure the deers' interest--not to mobilize the vast powers of the state to destroy them.