What is interesting about the urban deer situation is that it is not so much do to "lack of habitat" for deer, in my opinion. Many towns have habituated deer but the towns are in the midst of huge tracts of land that is traditional deer habitat. Apparently there has been a selection pressure favoring deer in urban areas (those in cities live to reproduce) and it seems that the situation will only change when an urban existence becomes hazardous or unfavorable to the animals.
There are many options as suggested in the following study:
http://fwp.mt.gov/content/getItem.aspx?id=40155We have created a protected utopia for deer (some city dwellers actually intentionaly feed deer) due to the hunting restrictions and the available food sources (landscape plants, bird feeders, compost piles, etc) Although an effective method for reducing deer numbers involves a baited trap and boltgun (similar to the device used to kill cattle for slaughter), it probably will not result in a long term solution to urban deer influx because essentially the program eliminates from the gene pool those deer that like apples and grain. Ideally, one would like to encourage the reproduction of deer that are wary of humans and wary of life in an urban setting.
It may be similar to the bear behavior in Yosemite. I suspect that there is considerable "training" of deer young by successful urban adult deer. In other words, until there are widely effective predators or harassment in an urban setting ( making urban habitat more unpleasant to deer than rural) it seems to me unlikely that urban deer populations will be reduced in the long term.
The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.
-- Carl Sagan
