Deer plan is hardly 'without pain'
6:18 PM, Sep. 23, 2011

Judge Phillip Rumsey has unsurprisingly decided that the Village of Cayuga
Heights may proceed with its sterilization of 20 to 60 deer (quite a wide
margin) and the killing of all the rest.

Rumsey excludes net-and-bolt, which the Ithaca Journal's Sept. 16 story
describes as "designed to kill them without pain." Having a bolt of metal shot
into your head is hardly painless; it is all the more painful if you have been
caught in a net, flailed about in panic, been injured and then are grabbed by
people trying to hold you still for the "bolting."

Mayor Kate Supron asserts that the judge decided she and her associates were
"doing the right thing." He did no such thing. He avoided more substantive
issues and narrowly found that they planned to act in accordance with prescribed
procedure. Many very wrong things have been done following prescribed
procedures.

We are now back to a costly program that raises taxes, has dubious efficacy and
will require the consent of residents to have firearms discharged near their
homes. The even broader issue is whether we should arrange the world to our
liking by killing others, or whether it is more desirable to find non-lethal
ways of dealing with the deer.

Dominick LaCapra
Cayuga Heights

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