The stories in Environmental controversies from WXYZ: Deer culling and oil drilling continue to develop. First, one story appears to be over, as WXYZ reported last week Drilling to cease in Shelby Township, no oil found at well.
That's good news for the residents and people who visit Stony Creek Metro Park, including my students.
Next, MLive describes an alternative to hiring a sharpshooter to cull Ann Arbor's deer herd in Humane Society to assess potential for deer fertility control in Ann Arbor.
The possibility of a city-funded deer cull in Ann Arbor has citizens on both sides of the issue adamantly arguing for and against shooting deer in the city.I have nothing against hunting, but if the residents and government officials of Ann Arbor can control their deer herd without it, I'm OK with that, too. I wish everyone in the town where I lived for a decade the wisdom to make the correct decision for them. When that happens, I promise to report it.
As a potential alternative to going the lethal route, the Humane Society of the United States is now being invited to travel to Ann Arbor to assess the feasibility for conducting a deer fertility control research project here.
If it's determined to be feasible, the Humane Society has indicated a willingness to work with the city to prepare and submit a proposal to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, seeking approval for a fertility control program.
The Humane Society is working with communities around the country to implement immunocontraception and surgical sterilization methods as an alternative to killing deer.
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"Fertility control may be a viable option that could be used to stabilize and reduce deer populations over time in urban communities, especially in areas where culls may not be effective, logistically feasible or socially acceptable," [Stephanie Boyles Griffin, the Humane Society's senior director of wildlife response, innovations and services] wrote in a letter shared with city officials. "There are already ongoing projects in Hastings-On-Hudson, Cayuga Heights and East Hampton, New York, as well as in San Jose, California, Fairfax City, Virginia, and Baltimore County and Montgomery County, Maryland, to name a few."
Hey Pinku, totally off-topic to your post here, but since I am reminded of your blog each time I read the top few comments on Kunstler day (until the anti-Semites and retrograde wankers kick in) I was wondering if you read a blogger who calls himself The War Nerd? This is the paragraph in JHK's piece today that put me in mind of that:
ReplyDelete"It’s also interesting that the news media is totally out-of-touch with the biggest prize on the great gameboard: Saudi Arabia. You think ISIS overrunning Iraq is bad news? Wait until the ordnance starts flying around Riyadh. Notice, too, that there’s no news coming out of Yemen on the base of the Arabian peninsula, a failed state with a population nearly equal to its neighbor. If we have any idea what’s going on there — and surely the Pentagon and NSA do — then it’s not for popular consumption."
This Nerd, whose screen name is Gary Brecher, is cynical, well-informed and sarcastically funny in his analysis of conflicts from Yemen to East Timor. He's got more insight to ISIS than anything I've seen in the lamescream corporidiot media, and he's more fun to read than Juan Cole (who's a superb Middle Eastern analyst. Just no larfs from him.) I've been reading the Nerd since he wrote for eXiled Online, a scatalogical political 'zine that was published in Moscow during the mid-2000s (before Putin's thugs ran the authors out.) That's where Matt Taibbi got his start, as well as Mark Ames, who's a hard-hitting muckraker, just without Taibbi's flair. Bonus points for you -- the War Nerd is a teacher (ESL in multiple foreign countries where he and his wife keep getting run out of.) If you never heard of the guy, he's like the Archdruid of War. You and your students might gain some perspective from him.
I'd heard of The War Nerd and I used to read eXiled Online, but I'd never read him there. Thanks for telling me what happened to that publication and pointing me to where he blogs now.
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