Garden Sate bear hunt

Perhaps inspired by an episode of "The Sopranos" where a bear shows up on Tony's patio, scaring the fool out of the mobster's teenaged son, New Jersey recently held a licensed six-day bear hunt. About 5,000 sportsmen and a smaller number of animal rights protesters showed up for the hunt, limited to the state's three rural northwestern counties. Maybe because the weather was cold, with snow expected, or possibly because anti-hunting activists have lost several courtroom battles, the number of sign-carrying sentimentalists appears to have been few.

In a sure sign of the impending apocalypse, The New York Times ran two same-day columns defending sport hunting as the only sensible answer to wildlife over-population--one by Nicholas Kristof, the other by Metro columnist Peter Applebome. Kristof argued that although the "university-educated crowd in the cities" views hunting as "barbaric," "brutal and vaguely psychopathic" hunters are needed to thin expanding deer herds. He urged readers to take up rifles as a civic duty, kind of like joining the Peace Corps.

Applebome (a former colleague) admitted that he'd always thought his cousin "nuts and morally deficient because he trekked off into the woods every fall with his hunting buddies." But he, too, ended up expressing thanks to his "suburban Rambo neighbors" for dealing with the problem of dog-food thieving bears.

More usefully, Applebome also pointed out that if corporations were doing to northeastern forests what deer are doing, "stunting future growth, killing plants and trees, destroying food and habitat for other creatures ... it would be viewed as an environmental crime of epic scale."

I suppose that's progress of a kind, although it's been awfully long in coming. On recent visits to New Jersey's semi-rural suburbs, I was shocked at the numbers of maimed, dead deer lying along roadsides. The animals graze in broad daylight, picturesque to some, but odd behavior for whitetail deer, which derive insufficient nutrition from grass. Their ribs were visible in late September, a bad sign with winter coming. No wonder they're cropping suburbanites' vegetable and flower gardens.

Motorists there are killing deer in such numbers that local road crews can't keep up with the carnage. I'm talking two or three dead deer every five-minute trip to the supermarket; it's a sad, grisly spectacle. Memorably, if not tastefully, Kristof asks readers to ponder the human costs of these collisions: "(I)n a typical year," he writes "an American is less likely to be killed by Osama bin Laden than by Bambi."

Friends tell me things have gotten equally bad on the outskirts of the San Francisco Bay area, and doubtless on the metastasizing edges of other big cities too. So yeah, I guess if I lived in either place, I'd be inclined to take up deer hunting again, although the animals have grown so habituated to humans it'd be something like shooting cows. But then I've been preaching this particular sermon for quite some time.

At the expense of temporarily succumbing to red state versus blue state nonsense to make a point: anti-hunting zealotry has long served as the functional equivalent of creationism among what I call the "anti-gravity left." Like all forms of Puritanism, it originates in a need to cleanse oneself of sin by casting one's imagined enemies as wicked. As night follows day, Kristof's column drew angry letters depicting deer hunting as "a socially acceptable means of venting one's blood lust."

Given the letter writer's North Jersey address, I'm sure he drives around broken deer carcasses every day. But those, see, are accidents; there's no unseemly lust involved. Another writer opines that hunting for population control is futile, as "(d)eer will quickly adjust ... by more births as competition for food and habitat is reduced." A third suggests that "the correct solution includes re-establishing ecological balance through the reintroduction of the predators that we hunted into local extinction."

Never mind that human predation--Native Americans were very efficient hunters--has always been a major contributor to nature's mythical "balance" where deer are concerned. Which predators capable of killing deer would the fellow like to see in Tony Soprano's backyard next? Mountain lions? Timber wolves? Impossible. Anybody with a knowledge of tenth grade biology knows these guys are substituting fantasy for reality.

If I wanted to be a smart aleck, I'd propose that blue state New Jersey start a cultural exchange program with a nearby red state, say West Virginia, to solve its deer problem. Of course it's equally a fantasy to imagine that a few pickup loads of snuff-dipping good old boys could easily fix a mess so long in the making, and so inextricably connected to the suburban sprawl that most Americans view as a birthright.

Even so, it might be educational for suburbanites to witness firsthand something most prefer to ignore: hired hands doing their slaughtering and butchering for them.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a national magazine award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at genelyons2@sbcglobal.net.