Deer Cull in New York, East Hampton by Farm Bureau Stopped by Lawsuit

[Beringia]

10. Contraception

by Jay Kirkpatrick, Ph.D., Director, The Science and Conservation Center, Billings, MT

Economic dimensions of deer contraception. The cost of the vaccine is $21/dose (we, by law, must provide it at our cost of production, with no profit), the dart costs about $1.50, and the bulk of the labor to do the darting is where the real cost lies. Costs will vary from site to site, depending on who is doing the work and what they are paid. If you want to pay someone $80,000 a year to dart deer, the cost will be high; if you want to use trained volunteers the cost is less; if you use employees already employed by a park, or agency, or whatever, the cost is somewhere between. I actually can’t say what the costs would be in any given site because of these variables, but I kept the books for the first two years of the Fire Island project and the costs never exceeded $10,000. That included a two or three air fares from Ohio and Montana to New York, and we treated about 150 deer. My math shows that to come out to about $66/deer.


http://www.pzpinfo.org/home.html
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HSUS Fire Island Deer

Fire Island National Seashore was the The HSUS's original deer study site. The primary goals there were to see how effective PZP was in deer and whether or not more than 200 of them could be darted each year. Both were easily accomplished, but more importantly, we found immunocontraceptives alone could be used to stabilize and reduce a deer population over time.

http://www.humanesociety.org/animals/deer/tips/deer-humane-control.html

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As far as sterilization, there is program being tested now in Fairfax Virginia

http://fairfaxcity.patch.com/groups/politics-and-elections/p/city-council-votes-to-move-forward-with-deer-sterilization-program
Efforts to cull the population by passing an ordinance that would allow limited deer hunting within the city ended in a deadlock this past summer. Since then, the City has been presented with the opportunity to participate in this program and have it funded by a university-based research group that is examining the success rate of using such methods to control growing deer populations in municipalities that choose not to use lethal methods.

The program will be led by Dr. Anthony DeNicola of White Buffalo Inc.