Shortly before midnight on September 30th, Jason Miller wrote an e-mail to his supporters. "Let us grieve for the deer who will die tomorrow," he said, "but continue to fight relentlessly for those who remain alive."
This week, I wrote about Miller, the founder of Bite Club of KC, and the battle to save the deer at Shawnee Mission Park. Earlier this year, officials with the Johnson County Park and Recreation District determined the deer herd had grown so large that the animals were threatening their own survival -- and the survival of other species -- in the 1,200-acre green space.
The hunt didn't start on October 1, as Miller's e-mail feared, but the sharp-shooting could begin before the end of this week.
That's not the end of this story, though.
The activities of Bite Club out-paced the space I had for my story. For instance, at the end of September, Bite Club paid $1,700 --Miller fronting $950 of the total -- to upload a provocative press release onto the national service, PR Newswire. Within a few days, their accusations of deer "death panels" in Johnson County started popping up on Web sites like CNBC and Forbes.
But Miller's promise to create a "PR nightmare" for park officials didn't cause a shift in policy.
Even as the hunt was virtually assured, a dozen Bite Club members held vigil at the gates of Shawnee Mission Park last Saturday. Some wore tie-dyed shirts; other held signs with the group's unofficial mantra: "A park not a killing field." As cars slowed at a stop sign at the entrance, activists handed drivers fliers. "Deer are friends, not food," Miller called into a megaphone.
The next day, the group's attempt to close the park with a giant banner didn't go as planned. Parks police simply rerouted traffic around the activists. But that wasn't the end of Miller's ideas, either.
This week, with the help of a law school student, the group intends to file for a restraining order against Johnson County Parks and Rec. "I don't think they have the legal right to make this decision," Miller says of the commissioners' decision to cull the deer herd. He also warned that Bite Club will blame park commissioners for any accidents during the sharp-shooting or bow hunting harvest. "By endorsing this, if somebody is hurt or killed, we're going to hold them personally liable," Miller says.
Though time is short to stop the October cull, Miller is still confident the group will derail the bow hunt in December with its continued pressure on public officials. Miller admits that he's exhausted, working hours every night on Bite Club organizing. But, for him, this effort goes beyond Shawnee Mission Park.
"This deer campaign is just one battle in a much larger war," he says. "A lot of people are criticizing the fact that we're doing this, but they don't see that we're waging war on behalf of the deer as part of a larger struggle to protect animals and the environment. The cult of death and destruction, it's like a freight train moving at 110 miles per hour, crushing everything in its path. And I'm doing everything I can to derail that."
He's also building steam for a more visible animal rights movement in Kansas City. Activists are already planning protests in late October, targeting brain-mapping research that utilizes animals at the University of Kansas Medical Center.
"I've started the fire and it's taken off," Miller says. "This deer campaign is becoming an inferno."
Showing 1-3 of 3
The reason there seem to be too many deer is that hunting is regulated to obtain "maximum sustained yield" of the hunted species for the benefit of the four percent of us who consider killing wildlife a sport. Up to a point, it's a matter of the more you kill, the more you get because the population crash that occurs during hunting season stimulates compensatory breeding so that the population is restored, or even increased, when fawns are born in the spring.
Before game management took over, deer populations were maintained by natural factors that kept the number of animals in balance with their habitat. It hasn't helped that large tracts of habitat have been taken over by human development creating almost instant overpopulation.
Way too many people with little or no real knowledge of the subject are trying to way in on hunting and population control. Just for a minute, forget that you live in a dream world. The deer will starve to death, the dear will be sickly, the deer will die in or near the lake and the polution will create a whole new problem. You dont like guns, you dont like bows and you dont like hunters. OK. That is your choice. Here in lies the difference between progressive liberals and real people. If I dont like a book, I dont read it. If you dont like a book, you want it banned so no one can read it. The people of Shawnee Mission could have sold deer tags for this event and made money from it, but no, you chose to pay overtime and buy special equipment so that snipers have to kill the deer. Good job, now shut up.
Jason and his buds should get deer costumes and hang out in the park ... might be just the lawsuit fodder they need to stop the hunt!
like
dislike
