Oh Deer, Poor Deer, Bless Their Hearts

The early Spring road slaughter is on. I have in the past chided my hunting neighbors for not reducing the herd enough to keep the deer off the roads. To all the Nimrods I live near, I apologize.

Some sidebar, background is in order here. We live near a city in NC with a major university (in fact, there are four colleges that call this place home) with a major medical school, hospital and athletics department. We live in the county about 4 miles from THE MALL. Four to ten miles farther out are woods, creeks, farms, rural churches, rural dwellers, and RAMPANT DEVELOPMENT.

It is this development that is causing so much road kill. Roads that the animals used to cross safely, now have much more traffic. Folk who used to live in the city now live and drive in the country, and they haven't a clue about how to behave around farms, animals, rural school buses and mail delivery.

The developments, large and small, have occupied pastures, and destroyed woods; they have diverted natural drainage and eaten up a few small parcels of wetlands. They are rapidly turning our rural area into suburbia. I guess that's what they want.

I hope the deer just move to remoter regions of the state. The neighbors may have to go farther afield to hunt; I may never see them again passing through the small wood behind our house. But to see them dead in ditches is obscene.

BRB is Write (and mourns the land and its inhabitants)