Dan's Papers - January 16, 2009

The deer are everywhere in the Hamptons and the North Fork, but they don't know if they are coming or going. Year after year, the humans living on the same property hold meetings to determine what to do with them. And the number of different opinions seems to match the number of people who come to the meetings. The deer are a terrible nuisance. But they are cute.

There are those who want to hunt all the deer down and kill them with guns. There are those who want to catch them, dart them with sleeping medicine, put them in trucks and ship them to the Adirondacks so they can wake up wondering what the hell happened. There are those who want to castrate the boy deers. There are those who want to inject them with medicine so they cannot reproduce, there are those who want to shoot them but with bows and arrows, there are those who want to leave food out for them so they don't starve during the hard winter, there are those who want to fly overhead with infrared cameras and count them, and there are those who want them left entirely alone so they and your shrubs, flowers and trees can just fight it out, as perhaps mother nature intended.

Any and all of these things are in effect in various combinations in villages and towns throughout the East End. And now two of them have clashed.

Apparently, there is this group on Shelter Island that brushes the deer. Really. It must feel really good if you are a deer to have that done. This group builds large and elaborate but gentle traps in the woods that consist of big cages that if you are a deer you walk into if you see a little food in a bowl in the back of the trap inside.

You lean over and start munching, and behind you, the door gently shuts. Then the people begin brushing you down. It feels really good, and what they are doing is brushing you with this liquid pesticide that keeps ticks off you.

I am not making this up.

I am not exactly sure why it is they are doing this either, except that either it is because they want to calm down the deer (it is hunting season), or because they don't want the deer to get sick from the tick bites, or because they want to keep the deer from spreading the ticks to new areas in the Hamptons, where there have never been ticks before. It's one of those.

In any case, the tick brushers - they let the deer go after they brush them, of course - have come into conflict with the deer meat testers, who examine deer meat to see if there are any bad chemicals in it, a thing they do because there is this other group of people who have arranged for deer that have been shot to be butchered up, frozen and then brought to homeless shelters to be served to the less fortunate.

So they test the deer and they find there is this poison in it at a level that could be harmful to humans, if eaten. How about that?

By the way, with the current economic slowdown, there are going to be new job openings for people who would like to be hired to do yoga with the deer, set fire to the deer, tell the deer jokes, teach them to tap dance, and to listen to their problems, as long as you have a degree in psychiatry. Oh, and we also need people to teach them not to run into the road to be hit by cars. And people to teach them TO run into the roads to be hit by cars - only during hunting season, of course.