Geese. I'd rather have my local parks infested with rats than these foul fowl. Problem is, you can't kill them without having some elaborate program to feed them to the homeless or something. My upstate NY relatives just shoot them if they land on their property.

The only reason I can think of to use sharpshooters instead of (amateur) hunters is the risk of nailing a citizen instead of a deer. It's one thing to hunt in a reserve / park, another to do so in suburban back yards.

A couple of times a year we get bears in our back yard. Once in a while it's been a mom with a cub, once the bear came right up on our deck.

Unfortunately, animal husbandry policy in Massachusetts has been made by referenda the last few years, which means it's made by people living in and around Boston who rarely if ever see deer, let alone the bear, foxes, wild turkeys and cayotes we also get.

Twenty years ago, a huge concern in Arctic Canada was the caribou herds. They had "dwindled" to a couple of million. Development was frozen, endless studies were done and a whole activist industry was born worrying about the smelly, fly-bitten things (Nobody could actually do anything because they were wild, inaccessible herds and surprisingly difficult to find).

Then, in the mid-eighties, the caribou population started to rise dramatically. You have never seen so many disappointed people in your lives.

One of the more difficult to write news stories I ever got near was a dispute between the head of the school board, Fred Smith, and the superintendent of education, Ferd Smith, which led to Fred firing Ferd.

Fortunately, before this could go any further, Ferd, driving down a country road to a job interview, ran into an 8-point buck, which came through the windshield, one tine piercing Ferd in the heart and ending the controversy right there.

Most people fail to consider that when you go somewhere to get closer to Nature, Nature is also getting closer to you.

No where is that demonstrated better than in the pages of an REI catalog, where you can find everything one needs to simultaneously go deep into Nature while experiencing as little of it as possible.

Well, do you all hunt? Or just complain about the deer infestation and do nothing about it?

A friend of mine was driving on a Finnish highway and rounded a curve to find an elk in his path. Like moose, the animals stand just high enough that all their body mass comes right into your windshield -- the bumper and engine compartment just takes their legs out. The animal tore the roof out and a sharp metal edge struck his wife in the head, killing her. The kids were in the back seat.

Bret - I don't hunt. I stop and let my wife take pictures.

Bret --

I live in Northampton, Massachusetts. Hunting is probably the only death penalty offense I could get my neighbors to agree on. In any event, I don't mind the deer (we don't have a garden). It is, however, amusing that my wife grew up in far Northwestern Montana thinking of the east coast as a single urboplex from boston to DC and never saw anything like the number of bears we see in the average summer.

I just avoided three deer on the road last night on the way back from seeing "The Last Samurai" (save your money). There is no hunting shame in Minnesota, althouth there are a few animal rights cranks in the Twin Cities who even think that catch and release for geese unduly traumatizes their fragile sensibilities (the geese's, not the people's).

On a trip back from Duluth in June we stopped counting dead deer at 35, and had to stop or slow down to avoid hitting the live ones at leas 10 times.

I live just 25 miles north of Detroit. There are so many deer around here it is nearly like the plains of the Serengetti.

A half mile to the east is a large county park. Last weekend it was closed due to "Deer Management." Read "Bambi Blasting." The county government pays specialists to do what they charge hunters to do elsewhere.