HuntingNet.com Forums - Killing of Fawns Sparks Dispute

Here is the PGC's response to the claim that their policy is to kill orphaned fawns.

QUOTE]Killing of fawns sparks dispute
Intelligencer Journal
Lancaster New Era
Jul 24, 2009 08:16 EST
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By P.J. REILLY, Staff Writer

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Pa. Game Commission (193)
deer (149)
Jerry Feaser (31)
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Unified Sportsmen of P... (17)
Stephen Mohr (15)
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In Pennsylvania's wildlife rehabilitation community, it's known as "the Bambi letter."
A directive issued May 30, 2002, by former Pennsylvania Game Commission executive director Vern Ross informs all wildlife conservation officers (WCO), deputy wildlife conservation officers and agency dispatchers about the procedures to be followed when deer, and some other animals, are removed from the wild.
"In cases where the mother of the animal is known to be dead, or if the animal has been raised in captivity for an extended period of time, acquire the animal and dispose of it discretely and humanely," the letter states.
Bainbridge resident Stephen L. Mohr, a former member of the Game Commission's board of directors and current president of Unified Sportsmen of Pennsylvania, on Thursday sent to the media a two-page flier in which he claims Game Commission officers are killing thousands of orphaned deer fawns every year.
"I had one WCO tell me that clubbing was the easiest and quietest," Mohr states in the flier. "He had said, 'All I have to do is bend over and hold out my thumb. When they reach out for what they think is a bottle, I whack them on the head with a hammer handle. Then I throw them over a bank or a pit.'
"Folks, if you are not furious, sick in the stomach, teary eyed or feeling helpless, you had best check if you still have a pulse," the flier states.
All fawns should be given a chance to live, Mohr said, and the Game Commission should establish locations where orphaned fawns can be reared and released back into the wild.
"If they are turned loose and bears kill half of them, so be it," he said. "That's nature at work. But they should at least have a chance."
Game Commission spokesman Jerry Feaser accused Mohr of "taking a nugget of truth and wrapping it in lies and exaggerations."
He said Mohr, whose Unified Sportsmen organization is suing the Game Commission for allegedly mismanaging the state's deer herd, "hates" the agency and is only interested in directing public criticism at it.
"This is classic Mohr attempting to raise anger against the Game Commission," Feaser said.
Feaser admitted about 100 fawns removed from the wild each year are killed by Game Commission personnel, and that some of those are clubbed to death.
"The preferred method is a .22-caliber hollow point to the head, but it's not always possible to safely discharge a firearm," he said.
Feaser rejected Mohr's claim, however, that it's the agency's policy for all orphaned fawns taken into custody to be killed.
There are a handful of wildlife rehabilitators around the state, he said, that are licensed by the Game Commission to take in orphaned fawns, raise them and then release them back into the wild.
"If we can get them there, we'll try, but that's not always possible because there aren't that many around," he said.
Mohr said he doesn't believe there are any such rehabilitators in the state.
"The Game Commission doesn't license anyone to take in deer," he said.
Not true, said Peggy Hentz, founder of Red Creek Wildlife Center in Schuylkill County and president of Pennsylvania Association of Wildlife Rehabilitators.
Red Creek has been licensed to rehabilitate orphaned deer since 2003, she said, and there are about 10 other similarly licensed facilities throughout the state.
The nonprofit Red Creek rehabilitated and released 12 deer this year and about 30 last year, Hentz said.
"Most of the deer we get are brought in by the Game Commission or by people who were directed to us by the Game Commission," she said.
According to Feaser, the 2002 policy letter was drafted at a time when fears were high across the country about the spread of chronic wasting disease.
Mohr was a game commissioner at that time. He said the policy was established by Ross without input from the board of directors.
"I opposed it at the time, but nobody listened to me," Mohr said.
Chronic wasting disease is an always-fatal sickness spread from deer to deer that was rapidly moving east from western states, such as Colorado and Nebraska. It has now been found in deer in 11 states, including New York and West Virginia.
Because of those fears, farms across Pennsylvania that raise deer stopped taking in orphaned deer, as they had previously, Feaser said.
And wildlife rehabilitators at the time were not licensed to take in deer.
Feaser said Mohr fails to mention in his flier that the Game Commission's first direction to people who call the agency claiming they've taken in an orphaned fawn is to put the animal back where they found it.
"In most cases, the fawn wasn't orphaned at all," he said. "The mother was probably 100 yards away trying to draw attention away from the fawn."
Mohr also doesn't state in the flier that it is illegal for anyone to remove a fawn from the wild in the first place.
"That's when the problems start," Feaser said.
For instance, in 2006, two people in Clinton County were charged and gored by a buck they were attempting to chase out of a yard in a residential area.
A state trooper grabbed the buck by its antlers while it was attacking a woman and then shot and killed it.
An investigation by the Game Commission revealed a neighboring family had illegally taken in the deer as a fawn, and had continued feeding it up until the time of the attack.
"Fawns will imprint on humans if they're around them long enough after they're born," Hentz said. "Once it happens, it can't be reversed."
Last year, Red Creek Wildlife Center received a buck that had been removed from the wild as a fawn and kept in an apartment for 10 days, before a neighbor threatened to report the person who took it. That person then surrendered the animal.
"We put that fawn in with our other deer, and it acted normal," Hentz said. "When we released the herd, all the other deer steered clear of people. This buck tried to jump in a guy's pickup truck, and we had to put it down.
"It was imprinted on humans."
Beginning this fall, Hentz said she is going to offer classes training wildlife rehabilitators how to rear fawns for release back into the wild.
"Hopefully, we can get some more rehabilitators out there licensed to take deer," she said.
It's no small task, she admitted. Rehabilitating deer is expensive, requires a lot of space for pens and the facility has to be in an area where deer can be released.
"You're not going to see the Schuylkill Center's Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic near Philly taking deer," she said.
Mohr insists his decision to talk now about the killing of fawns has nothing to do with Unified's pending lawsuit against the Game Commission, in which the organization claims the agency's deer management program has reduced the state's herd to unacceptable levels.
He said he's publicizing it "because nobody seems to know about it."
"I think they should know," he said. "Then they can make up their own minds about whether it's right or wrong."
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