Fort Worth Motorcycle Riders

By Todd Masson, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
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If you're a fan of the law of unintended consequences, and how it always hinders the half-baked plans of arrogant leaders and self-righteous do-gooders, you'll enjoy what has happened in recent years on the campus of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

You might also learn a new way to get more bucks on your hunting land.

As reported in The Washington Post, a booming white-tailed deer population on the Cornell campus had administrators scratching their heads and grasping for a solution. Certainly, something had to be done. The animals were devouring native flora to the point that regeneration was impossible, and local residents kept smashing into the deer while trying to take their Buicks to the grocery.

The smart move would have been to bring in a team of bowhunters, and let them loose with orders to whack 'em and stack 'em. But that, of course, would have been painfully politically incorrect, so administrators instead gave approval five years ago to a plan that would involve capturing the does, tying their tubes and releasing them back into the wild, where they could struggle to eke out a meager living in a denuded forest in a state with brutally cold winters.

Do-gooders are nothing if not compassionate.

So the plan was put into action. A total of 77 does were captured and sterilized at a cost of $1,200 per deer, and they were released back onto the campus grounds, where they could continue to devour any green shoot lucky enough to spring up from the trampled forest floor.

On the one hand, the program had the intended effect: Most of the does (but not all) ceased producing fawns. But it also had a very unintended effect: It drew in fresh, eager bucks from miles around.

As every deer hunter knows, when does go into estrus, bucks become wild maniacs, and will bound fences, forsake feeding and run headlong into trees to reach the objects of their affections. Once a doe consummates with the buck of her dreams, that's it. She's done. Breeding is over for a year, and she focuses on nurturing the young life growing inside of her.

But if no buck is lucky enough to impregnate that doe, she'll cycle again the next month and again the month after that. Her scent travels for miles, and every buck that gets a snout-full falls madly, passionately in love.

You would think the veterinary students who performed the tubal ligations on the deer would have realized this, but none apparently did.

So while the numbers of fawns fell on the Cornell University campus, the population of bucks soared.

The program was a monumental failure. Surprise, surprise!

So this year, the school began a nuisance deer-removal program that involved, among other things, allowing volunteer bowhunters onto the campus to fling arrows at very high speeds through some of the animals' vital organs. Unlike the silly tubal-ligation program, this one worked precisely as any hunter would expect it would.

The campus's deer population was cut nearly in half after only one season, and because the hunters are volunteers, there was no cost to the university.

But of course, no bureaucratic leadership team likes a program that is effective and inexpensive, so Cornell has begun experiments to once again capture the does. This time, though, they'll actually remove their ovaries rather than simply tie their tubes.

You couldn't make this stuff up.

WillK675 wrote:No but due to the lack of regulated hunting they did get over populated in a specific area. This they need to be weeded down to a proper population.