THE TOWN OF Weston has a Bambi problem, the source of which is not so much deer, or Walt Disney, but an obscure Austrian writer named Felix Salten.
It was Salten who wrote the 1923 novel that became the 1942 movie “Bambi,” after which it has never really been OK to shoot a deer in America again. Oh, people still do it, just like people still eat double cheeseburgers topped with bacon, but they must shrug off widespread disbelief and contempt. Bambi changed us, and for the worse. In the novel, he matures from a mewling fawn to a pitiless stag, but the movie-going public fails to make a similar transition. In New England, fawning season is May through July, but humans fawn over Bambi all year long, making it tough to be a Weston selectman these days.
In June, the town’s Board of Selectmen accepted the Conservation Commission’s recommendation to allow bow hunting of deer on land the town owns. If selectmen later approve rules the Conservation Commission drafts, trained and licensed archers will cull excess deer as they do in towns such as Medfield, Duxbury, and Needham. There are, of course, thumpers who vigorously object, not only for the sake of the deer, but also out of legitimate worries about safety. The accidental shooting of a Norton woman walking her dog on New Year’s Eve is still fresh, and when that terrible image fades, another will take its place. Even seasoned hunters err, and it’s not just dogs who die. You can blaze orange year round and still wind up a statistic.
Still, the arguments for controlled bow hunting are persuasive. The state’s Division of Fisheries and Wildlife estimates there are 25 deer per square mile in the exurbs of Boston. Recently, I met one, a lissome young doe.
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After retrieving my son from the Framingham Logan Express at midnight, we followed her, tottering down the middle of a road, like a four-legged drunk a block from Route 9. Where will the doe sleep today? Perhaps in the shadow of Jordan’s Furniture, if she hasn’t already vaulted through somebody’s windshield. In Salten’s novel, the acrid scent of humans means “Danger!” to deer, but now the reverse is true. It’s been said that Bambi and his cousins are the most dangerous animals in America today, causing a million accidents (31 in Weston) that kill 200 people each year.
Deer kill more people than grizzlies, but no one screams when they see a one. Instead, we just say, “Awwww.” Most people responding to Weston’s survey on deer said they enjoy seeing them around town; they just don’t want them atop their cars or nibbling in their gardens. But deer are “very nice, but stupid” creatures, as a magpie observes in Salten’s “Bambi.” They care nothing about zoning laws. If a community decides it has too many deer, it has two choices: relocate or kill. And Massachusetts (being very nice, but stupid) generally prohibits the relocation of most kinds of wildlife.
In his book “The Mindful Carnivore,” Tovar Cerulli makes the case that intentional harm by humans can be kinder than natural death. The writer, a vegan-turned-hunter who has used both bow and gun, details an evolution in thinking that culminates with his first deliberate kill. Ironically, soon after, he accidentally hits a deer with his car. The collision was an existential postcard making clear that existence of any kind will always mean the obliteration of others. We’re all in the Hunger Games, whether we like it or not. We need to learn, like a certain Disney deer did, to come to grips with death that doesn’t occur offscreen.
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You can agree with Cerulli, and the Weston Board of Selectmen, and still not want people with bows and arrows sitting in trees near your neighborhood. Still, we must decide at some point what we’re conserving on “conservation land.” Plants only, or also the species of nature that possess blood, fur, and ticks? Ideally, like Noah, we would have only two of a kind — in this case, Bambi and Faline, properly neutered and coated with Frontline, carefully romping through wetlands for our viewing pleasure. Kind of like Eden.
But now we have death, necessary at times. And as Bambi once said, “It isn’t dreadful. It’s only hard.”
Jennifer Graham is a writer in Hopkinton.