After months of heated debate on how best to handle the overpopulated deer herd in Kansas City’s Shawnee Mission Park, the Johnson County Park and Recreation District has decided to allow sharpshooters and bowhunters to thin the herd.

That decision, as expected, has drawn objections from animal rights activists and anti-hunters. Instead of hunting the deer, some local residents have offered their own suggestions for handling the park’s deer problem.

From the Kansas City News:

One woman, who lives nearby, suggested scores of animal rights activists line up along the bank of the man-made lake and fan out methodically through the park, banging pots and pans to startle the deer out of the 1,200-acre green space.

Another resident proposed trucking in unseemly amounts of lion manure from the Kansas City Zoo, spreading it around Shawnee Mission Park and repelling the deer with the stench of their predators’ poop.

Most famously, the members of Bite Club of KC, submitted the concept of a Deer Auto-Assembler, which would create a deer preserve, possibly with an observation tower for animal-loving tourists.

The scary part is these were serious suggestions, which illustrate just how little animal rights activists understand wildlife management. None of these “solutions” get to the heart of the problem, which is that there are too many deer in the park and they have over-browsed their habitat. Scaring the deer out of the park by banging pots and pans (which would be virtually impossible and, at best, temporary) doesn’t solve the problem. Scaring deer out of the park with manure from lions (which aren’t a whitetail deer’s natural predator anyway) doesn’t solve the problem. And the park is already a deer preserve—that’s how they got overpopulated in the first place. 

Actually removing deer from the park is the only real solution, and that means thinning the herd through hunting. It’s a step that should have been taken years ago before the population got out of control. It’s what’s best for the park, the health of the deer and, whether they realize it or not, the people who live near the park. Doing nothing, which is essentially what the antis want, is what created the problem in the first place.

If the park is truly serious about managing its deer, then this hunt should be held annually and not just this year. To do otherwise makes about as much sense as banging pots and pans or dumping lion feces to scare the deer away.