Sixty four deer were killed in the four day hunt. Let’s assume about half, or 32 were does. At $1300 per doe (the widely quoted rate for capturing and injecting contraceptives) it would cost approximately $40,000 to sterilize 32 does.
How much did DCR spend to put on this hunt? Unless that figure is substantially less than $40,000, I don’t see how DCR has saved us any money.
Please share widely!
mike_cote says
and it was very well represented by probably at least a hundred people and several state police officers near the State Police barracks in Milton.
Well Done!
SomervilleTom says
You omitted the most valuable aspect of the exercise — the opportunity to thrill and inspire Massachusetts residents with a display of our security apparatus at work.
Residents get to see lots of flashing blue lights, armed men and women in uniform walking around looking just as tough anybody in any movie, lots of special jargon on really cool radios.
Exercises like this have as much to do with ACTUAL security (never mind saving money) as a Blue Angels fly-by at Fenway Park.
Our “security” exercises (this, TSA, no-fly lists, mass surveillance, etc) are ALL Kibuki theater. All of them.
Christopher says
…and everyone knows fly-bys are a form of entertainment. Nobody suggests otherwise. What I don’t understand is why an agency like DCR is sponsoring hunts. Wouldn’t they be in the business of protecting wildlife?
SomervilleTom says
Bob Hope’s Christmas specials, in front of masses of uniformed military audiences, were entertainment. When they resumed, during the Reagan years (as I recall), the signaled a profound and intentional shift in national attitude. It was no accident that an icon of a militarized era was dusted off and put back on display when the federal government decided it was time to beef up our military. The “security and crowd control” are a similar form of propaganda. As you say, “no real threat to national security”, but instead an in-your-face reminder of the ever-expanding militarization of day-to-day life.
I really encourage you to learn more about how entertainment, humor, advertising, and a whole raft of similar communications behavior is used for propaganda purposes to change public perception.
I remind you that although most of the fans that fill Fenway Park for a fly-over find it thrilling and fun, a GREAT MANY people in the world do not. My wife comes from a family who hid in bomb shelters in WWII Germany and Austria (hiding from US bombers, by the way). Her older siblings were babies during WWII. She grew up with first-hand family accounts of fearing for the lives of their children while Nazi soldiers were searching for dissidents and members of the resistance. For her and her family, the sound of military aircraft flying low and fast is TERRIFYING.
I encourage you to remember that “entertainment” for you, or for the fans of Fenway, is not the same as entertainment for “everybody”, and that entertainment is frequently used as a form of propaganda.
Christopher says
n/t
SomervilleTom says
Perhaps one person’s “paranoid” is another person’s “experience”.
If you think that it’s paranoid to associate militaristic “entertainment” with propaganda, then I encourage you to learn more about the very intentional programs funded by the US during past wars, and to dig deeper into the budget justifications for units like the Blue Angels.
Whether paranoid or not, the reaction of my wife when the fly-overs happen is very immediate and real. She is not entertained.
My first reaction is not as severe as hers, but — especially after 9/11 — I certainly notice military aircraft activity. We live close enough to Logan (and Logan is used often enough for these purposes) that increased military aviation activity is not at all abstract — it’s happening right outside my porch windows (where I work), and it’s very different from the civilian aircraft that I’m accustomed to.
In a time of already escalated tension like now, the presence of multiple military jets flying low and fast, or multiple military transports flying together, or even six or seven helicopters hovering nearby certainly gets my attention, and “entertainment” is not my first thought.
Christopher says
If they stop I wouldn’t miss it either. I understand how propaganda works, and if someone’s background includes living in a country where the military were oppressive to the people I can see how it might be unsettling. However, you make it sound like someone is going to think, “Aren’t those Blue Angels flying over Fenway awesome? Therefore, we should go to war!” That is quite the leap of logic to say the least.
spence says
You don’t understand how propaganda works.
Christopher says
This has certainly been part of my historical study. Effective propaganda needs to target an enemy, say the Germans in WWI, making them out to be barbaric and unhuman. Honestly, I doubt anyone who plans flyovers is thinking about anything other than the oohing and the aahing of the crowd.
SomervilleTom says
I’m glad you learned about so many things during your historical study.
You seem to have missed one of the more crucial lessons — how to discern the limits of your knowledge, and how to use the things you learn in school to acquire NEW knowledge after you graduate.
I remind you that today’s world is VERY DIFFERENT from the world of WWI, a full century ago. There is no doubt that the propaganda of WWI did as you describe.
I’m pretty sure that the purposes, means, and mechanisms of, say, surgery were VERY different in 1917 than they are today. I’m not sure why you think propaganda would be any different — especially since there is so much of it around for CURRENT study.
Christopher says
…is that what you describe strikes me as ineffective, and if it really IS that effective then I have more reason to be disappointed in the discernment skills of my fellow Americans than I thought. For the record, continuing to read history is what I do with the bulk of my free time. Certainly part of historical study was how to in fact study history.
SomervilleTom says
A different way the propaganda might work is something like the following:
Those warplanes screaming across at treetops and bristling with weapons aren’t threatening or scary, they’re entertaining. What are you, paranoid or something?
After they get you thinking about combat aircraft that way, they do similar things about more and more soldiers in combat fatigues and high-power weapons standing around every public gathering — those heavily-armed combat troops aren’t threatening or scary, they’re protecting us.
After a few years, then a decade, now fifteen, whole generations grow up accustomed to seeing heavily-armed combat troops at every public gathering, full-scale combat assault teams responding to routine drug busts, government agencies recording every communication, “police” that are indistinguishable from military units, “enemy combatants” taken off the street and held incommunicado for months at time, war crimes ordered by the highest levels of government and ignored (or applauded), civilian political leaders competing with each other to prove how tough they’re going to be on a succession of “enemies”. Whole generations that think people who don’t like such things are “paranoid”.
A different way someone might think is that by the time the police state is completed, whole generations WANT IT so that they feel “safe” from the many many evil bad guys (“terrorists”, or “communists”, or whomever the big bad evil enemy is that time around).
Going to war isn’t the point of the exercise.
Christopher says
…and nobody expects Blue Angels to start firing on Fenway Park as they fly over. Please tell me I’m not the only one who can make distinctions between and among various contexts! By the time we get to your fourth paragraph it is clearly no longer entertainment and anyone who argues that one must necessarily lead to the other has fallen into the logical fallacy of the slippery slope.
SomervilleTom says
We are talking about propaganda and how it is used by government. You apparently believe either that it doesn’t exist or that you are immune to it.
It isn’t worth our collective time to debate this further. You seem convinced that I am paranoid, and I am equally convinced that you are gullible.
SomervilleTom says
Perhaps you might dig a little deeper into your own assumptions about the purpose of the Blue Angels. For example, this November 2011 piece provides some perspective from the squadron’s commander (emphasis mine):
I note that commander does NOT use language like “entertain”. They don’t exist so that people can have fun.
He DOES use the language of propaganda:
– “improve morale”
– “help with recruiting”
– “public face”
– “motivated and inspired”
Believe what you will, but I suggest that the Pentagon did not spend $37M on the Blue Angels (or similar amounts on the Air Force Thunderbirds or Army Golden Knights) in 2011 for “entertainment”.
Christopher says
I guess it never occurred to me that so much thought was given to it from that angle. I do have to admit I AM learning more in this discussion about how the psyches of others are affected. I don’t claim to have any special powers of resistance and did not realize I would be so different.
scott12mass says
I enjoy watching commercials with a jaded eye toward all the lessons advertisers are trying to teach us as they sell a product. They may feel they are trying to make up for years of “Father (white) Knows Best”. For some it may be sub-conscious but it is interesting.
Who is most likely to have made a mistake which needs fixing? The middle age white male. Who does he go to see? The Black/female purveyor of the service, if it isn’t his wife who sets him straight. If there is a group it’s often very mixed racially and it’s a bonus if they can highlight inter-racial couples. (If I were Asian though I’d feel under-represented. And the inter-racial are seldom White guy/Black girl yet vice versa is common.)
Campbell’s soup even just came out with the gay couple commercial where they both use the Darth Vader “Luke I am your father” line.
No one is totally immune but everyone govt, business, is always trying to sell something.
thegreenmiles says
196 hunting permits were issued. Those hunters paid annual fees ranging from $11 to $99 (depending on age, residency, etc.). Assuming the average is the resident adult fee of $27, that’s $5,500 in fees paid.
Delivering contraception to only 32 does with a herd this big would do nothing – it would just give the hundreds of other fawns an easier time surviving. You need to deliver the contraception to at least 70% of the herd to meaningfully cut the population.
With at least 85 deer per square mile for a 9.6 square mile reservation, we’re talking about over 800 deer. Let’s ballpark it that 70% of the does is 300 deer – with your $1,300 per doe cost, that’s $400,000. And deer contraception only works for a few years, so you need to be ready to spend that again pretty soon.
SomervilleTom says
I don’t have a problem with culling the herd.
My issue is with the “security and crowd control” that apparently accompanied it. I’m pretty sure that hunters can enjoy their sport without theatrics from law enforcement.
bob-gardner says
. . and to leave out the other arguments. Is killing 32 does any more effective in controlling population than delivering contraceptives to 32 deer? You tell me. Assuming that there is no great difference, I’d like to see some kind of accounting for the money spent by DCR for the hunt.
$5500 doesn’t seem like enough money to sway the argument one way or the other. But if the object is to raise money from fees, DCR could do a lot better if they let the animal rights people bid against the hunters as a group. The high bidder would get to decide whether to use guns or contraceptives.
thegreenmiles says
If you believe there’s a real cost to deer overpopulation, both to people and to other species, there’s a big value in cutting the herd by 10% right now (hunting) vs. cutting it by 0% right now (contraception).
bob-gardner says
I checked your link and there is a tweet right next to your post:
“Do people pushing deer contraception in Blue Hills realize how costly it is for uncertain results?”
The implication is that contraception should not even be considered because of the cost.
The cost argument, though, seems to be bogus.
Not that it doesn’t fool some folks. On WGBH, for example, Marjorie gasped at the $1300 figure while Jim chortled something about protesters not understanding reality. Then Jim and Marjorie started giggling.
That’s standard fare at WGBH, but people of ordinary intelligence, who can do arithmetic won’t be fooled for long.
It makes me suspicious that deer hunting is being pushed as a boon to the taxpayer. If you have compelling arguments for this hunt, why use a bogus one?