TOWN OF POUGHKEEPSIE – The local group “Save Our Deer” will conduct a rally this afternoon to oppose the latest deer cull conducted by Vassar College on its Vassar Farm and Ecological Preserve.
This month, management officials from the USDA will conduct the cull.
Vassar spokesman Jeffrey Kosmacher said managing deer populations goes beyond Vassar with the Mohonk Preserve, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, and Teatown Lake Reservation among the other Hudson Valley locales that employ similar practices.
“People throughout the Hudson Valley know there is a deer overpopulation problem,” Kosmacher said. “They see it in their yards, on the roads, and we see it in the decimation of the saplings and the destruction of eco-systems in our ecological preserves. By working with USDA Wildlife Services, we have found a safe, humane and effective way to maintain a deer population that our preserve can sustain.”
Kosmacher said the Vassar Farm land is about one square mile. “Just before the 2014 spring birthing season we estimated the deer population there to be between 48 and 59 per square mile,” he said. “Studies show that plant and animal communities have been greatly damaged at other northeastern sites when there are more than 10 deer per square mile.”
Kosmacher said even before several deer were born last spring at the Vassar Farm, “We already had dozens more deer living there than the land can sustain.”
But, the anti-culling group stated on its Facebook page that the deer population was “stable before the college arrogantly began a campaign of repeatedly baiting them with food, only to shoot them in the head, in a practice that even hunters find unsportsmanlike and cruel.”
Vassar’s deer management program is explained at http://farm.vassar.edu .
