On this subject, here's something interesting that came in the email today:
EMIGRANT, Mont.--Deercrash.com--run by the University of Wisconsin-Madison--is not recommended bedtime reading before a road trip over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house. But it is a reality check on a pullulating U.S. highway hazard. Deer-vehicle crashes in 2003 produced 367 human fatalities. Even for survivors, an encounter with a leaping stag takes a toll: The University of North Carolina's Highway Safety Research Center cites a 1995 study claiming that the property damage from such accidents that year was $1.2 billion.
Deer danger on U.S. highways is reaching epidemic proportions. Take Michigan: The state has an estimated 1.75 million white-tailed deer, and when mating season rolls around, they literally take to the streets. The costs, in life and property, prompted Gov. Jennifer Granholm to declare October "Michigan Car-Deer Crash Safety Awareness Month."
The omnivorous bear may appear a more threatening animal than the deer, but Bambi and his kind are statistically more dangerous to the average American. Lacking predators--if you don't count the automobile--adorable, big-eyed does have become a national menace. (Mind you, I'm not passing the buck: Males are a part of the problem too.)
Yet where there is crisis there is also opportunity. That's what New Zealand found when it turned to the market to solve its feral population explosion more than two decades ago. At a conference here hosted by the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), based in nearby Bozeman, former New Zealand cabinet member Maurice McTigue described a uniquely Kiwi solution to too many deer chasing too few plants--what I like to call stagflation. Not only did the market solve the New Zealanders' problem, but the plan also created a whole new export industry.
God didn't put deer in New Zealand, but settlers decided he had erred. They imported a small number--perhaps as few as 50--some 100 years ago to add to the ambience. With nothing to eat them, the red deer and wapiti (elk) were soon breeding with each other and multiplying like mathematicians. It didn't take long for the government to brand these newcomers "noxious pests." For New Zealanders, Mr. McTigue says, the problem wasn't so much highway danger as the fact that the deer "were enormously destructive to the native forests."
Government culling programs sought to eradicate the deer on the grounds that they were not native. Yet the ubiquitous critters flourished as long as the sale of deer meat in New Zealand was illegal. Paradoxically, as Mr. McTigue explains, once commercial deer farming was legalized in the early 1980s, the unleashed animal spirits of entrepreneurs provided the solution: Aspiring deer farmers went out and captured the varmints in large numbers. One remarkable exploit related by Mr. McTigue was a "deer hunter" jumping from a helicopter onto the back of a wapiti mix, wrestling it to the ground and tying up its legs.
Yet how the herds were rounded up is not nearly as important as the fact that, by assigning value to them, businesses had an incentive to bring them in. Mr. McTigue holds that the deer-farming idea was the precursor to New Zealand's free-market revolution, the start of "thinking differently" about solutions to the country's problems.
There are still wild deer in New Zealand but farming has brought the populations under control. Concerns about disease outbreaks originating among the farmed deer and spreading to the wild deer have not been borne out. In fact tuberculosis, once a problem among wild deer, is nonexistent on farms.
Not only has forest vegetation been preserved by putting a price on deer but venison is a booming export industry, with New Zealand winning 40% of the world venison market. Remarkably, according to Mr. McTigue, Canada--a deer haven--gets three-quarters of its venison from New Zealand. He says the other amazingly lucrative market is antler racks, which currently fetch about $80 a pound in Asia, where they are ground up and used as aphrodisiacs. Hides are sent to Asia as well for tanning.
Americans provide New Zealand's second largest market for venison, after Europe. There have been some attempts to legalize deer farming in the U.S., but the regulations have been highly restrictive and limited; selling hunted-deer meat remains illegal. So while New Zealand sets market forces loose to rein in the stampede and create wealth, the U.S. leaves population control up to the American driver and forfeits, as road kill, a marketable and valuable resource.