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Killing Deer Not the Best Strategy In Battle Against Lyme Disease
When I saw the article in Bar Harbor Story about LD 1438, a bill introduced by Representative Faulkingham of Winter Harbor, I felt as if I was experiencing deja vu. In the not so distant past, the voters of Bar Harbor thought they had put the question of legalizing deer hunting to bed with a decisive no at the ballot box.
From the many hours spent attending town council and deer task force meetings, speaking with local biologists, conducting online research and composing LTEs, I discovered that one of the common arguments used by proponents of legalizing deer hunting is that a reduction of the local deer population will reduce the cases of Lyme disease.
Well, what if one of the leading scientists on the Blacklegged tick, more commonly known as the deer tick (quite unfortunate for the poor deer), told you that long-term data show that the number of Lyme-infected ticks are more correlated with the number of white-footed mice than the number of deer?
Dr. Richard Ostfeld is a disease ecologist who has been studying the Blacklegged tick for over 25 years at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York State. According to Dr. Ostfeld, deer are not the actual problem because they don’t transmit Lyme disease bacterium or other tick borne pathogens. Dr. Ostfeld says that rodents such as the white-footed mouse and the eastern chipmunk are “high-quality hosts” for ticks because the ticks not only feed on them, but they also contract the tick-borne pathogens, and those pathogens are then transmitted to other ticks that feed off of them. This keeps the spread of Lyme disease going. Coyotes, foxes, and bobcats are some of our best friends in the fight against the spread of Lyme disease because they keep the rodent population in check and that means fewer “high quality hosts.”
Currently, at the state level, there is a bill: LD 1293 “An Act to Prohibit Coyote-Killing Contests” that is working its way through the legislature. It is important that you contact your state senator and representative as soon as you can about this issue, because we need to protect one of our most important allies in the fight against the spread of Lyme and other tick borne pathogens.
In conclusion, I encourage everyone to visit caryinstitute.org to watch lectures, read studies and articles to learn more about this serious issue. Dr. Ostfeld has published books on the subject as well. If we truly want to lessen the spread of Lyme disease and other tick-borne pathogens on Mount Desert Island, killing the local deer is most likely not an effective strategy.
Katherine Whitney
Bar Harbor
ThankYou for spotlighting the complexities of Lyme Disease transmission. Specifically, the role of mice. And the need for an ecological understanding of the problem, in order to find an effective solution.
Hunting deer on MDI is a complex issue, with local and national elements and with safety implications for the island's human resident and tourist populations. The entire big picture must be considered in debating the desirability of expanded deer hunting here and its potential for reducing the threat of Lyme Disease.
Republican Faulkingham inserting himself into a local debate and pushing a state instituted law specific to one local site (outside his district) is suspect in itself. And must be investigated in terms of the state political environment, the role of party politics, and the Republican party's bent for expanding gun ownership while suppressing gun violence data and opposing safety initiatives.
Whatever we may think of deer hunting, I think relatively few of us would welcome it as a means of legitimizing the proliferation of assault weapons on MDI or to normalize their use in hunting - which has not only questions of legality but of ethical and effective hunting.
This letter hopefully gets out into the mainstream media before we have jack daniel's fueled armed assassins in our backyards.