Saturday, May 28, 2016

Rule 1: Don't Make Bambi Angry...

New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio has a problem in one of the boroughs of his great city.

We're accustomed to thinking of New York as one massive clump of buildings, but the borough of Staten Island does have some undeveloped areas. And in them live some deer. A whole lot of deer. Like more than 700 deer, who cause problems ranging from lawn nuisances to destroying cars that hit them (in fairness to the deer, they don't come off so great in those kinds of encounters either).

So City Hall called in some ecologists to try to develop a plan to control the deer population ("We got this." -- every redneck in the world). There were apparently several proposals. One idea that was not suggested was to try to trap and round up the male deer and give them all vasectomies ("He doesn't walk very good, does he?" -- Thumper). The reason it wasn't suggested, according to one of the ecologists the city consulted, is because it won't work. One of his colleagues doubts that more than 50 percent of the wild bucks could be captured and operated on, and that's before they learn to read.

A researcher at The Deer Laboratory at the University of Georgia -- because of course a university in the south is going to have at least one department connected to hunting -- suggests that even if the city were able to trap and vasectomize all of the Staten Island male deer, the females would simply go back into heat once they proved to be not pregnant. At which point some non-Staten Island bucks would stroll in and say, "Hello, ladies," cheap guitar music would begin playing and Staten Island bucks would all stand around and discuss how many painful deaths they could inflict on a certain group of veterinarians.

So naturally that's the plan Mayor DeBlasio picked.

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