Newsday:

Head of the Harbor Village officials are considering allowing researchers to use dart guns to treat deer in an experimental contraception program intended to shrink the population there.

Residents have complained the roughly 600 deer living in and around the densely wooded North Shore village feast on gardens and treat expensive landscaping like “an open salad bar,” as one person wrote in response to a village survey on residents’ experiences with the animals. Residents also worried about deer colliding with vehicles on the village’s winding, unlit roads, and the animals’ role as hosts for the ticks that carry Lyme disease.

New York State’s preferred method of deer population control is hunting, which many village residents reject as inhumane. So trustees decided last year to pursue nonlethal means of population control and contacted researchers from the Humane Society of the United States and Tufts University exploring use of porcine zona pellucid, or PZP, a substance derived from pig ovaries that uses an animal’s own immune system to prevent pregnancy in wildlife populations.

Head of the Harbor would become the second community on Long Island, after Fire Island, to host the work, which researchers estimate will cost $242,215 and take place over six years. The money would come from the village, foundations and private donors.

Eric Stubbs, a member of the village’s Deer Management Advisory Committee and an economist who commutes by train to New York City, said he sees deer on his morning drive to the station about once a week. “They’re a significant presence,” he said.

Most of his neighbors are eager for the project to start, he said. “It has implications not just for us, but for towns all over Long Island . . . It’s one of the few things where you can get majority support,” he said.
Researchers use dart guns to dose female deer with PZP or sedatives so they can be injected by hand with the substance.

“What we’re hoping to do long-term is offer a solution for wildlife managers to use for areas where hunting or lethal means are not feasible or kosher with the community,” said Kali Pereira, HSUS senior wildlife manager.

HSUS dart guns – Pereira called them dart projectors – are similar to paintball guns and powered by carbon dioxide, she said. Only trained researchers use them, she said.

But the same law that effectively outlaws hunting in Head of the Harbor could keep the researchers from their work. It bans discharge of most projectile weapons including those, like the researchers use, that are gas- or air-powered.

“The activity they’re seeking to import into the village does not comply with their own local law,” said Assemb. Tom McKevitt (R-East Meadow), a lawyer who specializes in municipal law.

No-discharge laws are common across Long Island, he said. Although Head of the Harbor’s code makes exceptions for police and for non-officers who discharge a weapon “provided it is reasonably necessary for the protection of life or property,” McKevitt said it would be “a stretch” to apply that clause to the defense of perennials from hungry deer. Violators face fines of up to $250 and jail time.

You Yankees are so janky.  You’re planning to spend a quarter of a million dollars to neuter deer in order to do what hunting has done for decades so well – control the herd population.

Oh well, since money grows on trees this is a viable option for you, I guess. And hey, at least you aren’t sending the king’s men into the king’s forests to cull the population because no one else is good enough to do that.