Hunting Help versus Cages: A Deer Solution

Officials in Longueuil say they will have to kill half the white-tailed deer living in a municipal green space as efforts to control their population haven’t worked. The City of Longueuil saying that the deer population in Michel-Chartrand Park is twice the roughly 15 deer that the park can support. Authorities will cull the deer in the coming weeks by trapping the animals first and then euthanizing them. They plan to donate the meat from the animals to local food banks.

But one experienced hunter from Kahnawà:ke says that they should allow hunters to do the job. 22-year-old Frankie Junior McComber has been hunting for most of his life:

“Hopefully Longueuil reaches out to hunters instead of cages. I guess the way out for them would be tax money, right, because somebody has to do that job. You’re not just sending anybody out with a cage and hopefully a deer gets in there. So whether that’s policing or game wardens or the ‘ministry of fawns protection’, I don’t think that putting a deer in cage is proper.”

Authorities say there were about 32 deer in the park as of 2017, and in the last year, emergency services received 38 calls for accidents involving deer.