For Leopold, radical measures of control took a toll
Some 50 years ago, Aldo Leopold, UW–Madison professor of wildlife ecology and environmental icon, sounded the first alarm about Wisconsin’s looming overabundance of deer.
And he did something radical about it: As one of six board members of the Wisconsin Conservation Commission, the precursor of Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources, Leopold advocated and helped implement the first harvest of young bucks and does during the hunt of 1943.
For opponents of the plan, including many resort owners, hunters and anti-hunters, the annual gun deer season that year became known as the “Slaughter of ’43.” The idea of shooting antlerless deer, a more common deer management strategy today, “was considered heresy,” according to Leopold’s biographer Curt Meine. “It wasn’t what anybody wanted to hear.”
But Leopold, says Meine, was coming at the problem from a multitude of perspectives: “He looked at the issue not only as a hunter and a wildlife manager, but as a scientist, a conservationist and even as a historian. By that time he had carefully studied the history of Wisconsin’s deer herd.”
Moreover, Leopold brought to the issue his experience with overabundant deer elsewhere. In the American southwest and other areas of the eastern and midwestern United States, he’d witnessed first-hand the effects of landscapes “foaming with deer.” In Germany, he’d studied the long-term impacts of centuries of intensive deer management.
The events of 1943, prompted a backlash against Leopold, and he was the object of personal attack up until his death in 1949. The affair, says Meine, had an important impact on Leopold, especially on the thinking and writing behind his conservation classic, “A Sand County Almanac.”
“The issue is not so different today,” says Meine. “Leopold saw that problems inevitably arise if management focuses too heavily on a single species — when we manage for just one part of the system, and pay inadequate attention to the system as a whole.”
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