Ohio's deer management unit proposal abandons common sense

It is a pity – and wrong-headed – that most participants to the Ohio Division of Wildlife’s recently completed Deer Stakeholders’ series of pow-wows were said to have vigorously nodded “yes” to the concept of a so-called Deer Management Unit system.

Had they not been so enthralled with the siren song by wildlife biologists and shaken their heads so enthusiastically, they might have recognized the idea was impractical and very possibly, unnecessary.

Much in the group’s boringly professorial 57-page report is made of the so-named DMUs (the document is chock-full of bureaucratic-inspired acronyms). Thing is, these proposed deer management units are nothing more than a gerrymandered system that uses highways and natural features instead of the current, easily recognized county-based system to describe what bag limits apply.

The defect here is the assumption that somehow the deer herd on one side of a two-lane is larger (or smaller) than a deer herd on the road’s other side, and thus is in need of either more liberal or more conservative regulations. That failing was brought up and had to be amended during the now largely forgotten Urban Deer Zone era.

Close to home here in Lake County the ill-advised nature of the zones is clearly evident. The report’s mention of the deer management units – and a proposed map that was presented recently before the eight-member Ohio Wildlife Council – demonstrates the poverty of such a deer management unit plan.

Lake County is the smallest of the state’s 88. And yet the proposed map slices no fewer than seven of Lake’s townships, villages and cities, splitting them into likely both more liberal and more conservative bag-limit jurisdictions.

Even more telling the proposed map places the entire Holden Arboretum, nearly all of both Kirtland Hills Village and Kirtland City in the same zone as Geauga and Ashtabula counties, two counties with more conservative bag limits. These three entities each allows controlled archery deer hunting for a reason: They have too many deer. Lump them into a zone with greater restrictions and you defeat the purpose of their controlled hunts.

My home county is hardly alone in seeing itself carved up into an array of zones with very possibly conflicting and differing rules and bag limits. Down in the aforementioned Geauga County is South Russell Village, a high-end community that also subscribes to a heavily regulated and controlled archery deer hunt.

State Wildlife officials also make much of the notion that somehow deer management zones are a better system of tooling deer-hunting regulations, including bag limits. The question must be asked: “Better than what?”

Last season Ohio’s deer hunters shot 186,247 deer and season before that, 182,169 animals; and the season before that, 188,335 deer; and the season before that, 175,745 white-tails.

Oh, let’s not forget this other important detail. Ohio’s has a reputation for being one of the country’s best states for producing trophy-class bucks. In fact, “Buckmasters” magazine ranks Ohio as Number Two, just behind Illinois. “North American Whitetail puts Ohio at Number Six while “Peterson’s Hunting” places Ohio also at Number Two.

All of this, based on a county-by-county management system, which Ohio has successfully used not just for decades but for several generations. So the question, again, is “better than what?”

Let’s view Ohio’s county-by-county system in a different light. In Jefferson County during the summer of 2017 a serious case of epizootic hemorrhagic disease swept through that politically defined area. So much so that this past deer-hunting season, sportsmen there killed 1,903 deer verses the 2,800 animals that hunters killed during the 2016-2017 season.

If you look at the new Ohio hunting law digest you’ll see that Jefferson County is now excluded from the state’s “Thee Deer County” zone and into a more restrictive and stand-alone two-deer stipulation. Again, this adaptation came about because Jefferson County’s deer kill could be tracked on a weekly basis since the system Ohio uses is county based, not a district-zone one.

Nor is Ohio alone in designating counties instead of squirrely written units to establish deer-hunting regions. Down Texas way – the nation’s Number One deer-producing state – counties are held intact and not chopped up in some bizarre manner.

The same largely applies to Wisconsin, a state that more often than not nationally ranks second in the number of deer taken by hunters. With a couple of exceptions due to the presence of chronic wasting disease where non-county boundaries are employed, the state still incorporates a user-friendly county-based system.

Then, too, Kentucky (to Ohio’s south if some Wildlife Division official needs to know) likewise manages its deer herd with county designations. So does Illinois. And Iowa. All are consistently among the nation’s top deer-hunting states.

Of course Ohio is not Wisconsin, Kentucky or Iowa, let alone Texas. Then again, Ohio is not Montana, Wyoming, or Colorado, either, where deer management zones are the norm.

Bluntly and simply, Ohio ought not to adopt a boutique deer management unit system simply because it is biologically fashionable.

While the current use of county boundaries may be less than perfect, the Wildlife Division’s concept of deer management units without also taking into account the many societal consequences and success demonstrated by history does not a good policy neighbor make.

- By Jeffrey L. Frischkorn
JFrischk@Ameritech.net