City council directed staff to study culling the city’s resident deer herd in May 2014. It voted to create a “deer management program” in August 2015. But David Silkworth and Tanya Ridella-Mehlos didn’t learn that the city was planning to shoot deer in its parks until last October.

“We were walking on Pauline,” Ridella-Mehlos recalls, when they saw signs that read, “Stop the Shoot.” Silkworth wasn’t worried. “I never believed city council would vote for that.”

But they did. In November council hired U.S. Department of Agriculture sharpshooters to kill as many as 100 deer during January and February. The vote was ten to one, with only mayor Christopher Taylor opposed.

“My initial response was a community values response,” says Silkworth, over an apple Izze at the downtown Sweetwaters. “I didn’t believe it was consistent with the ethos of who we are as a people.

“After I looked into it, it became a public integrity issue. I believe a small group of individuals was able to influence council to carry out a personal pest control policy.”

The couple joined the Friends of Ann Arbor Wildlife in Nature–FAAWN. They say the group has 125 members, sixty of whom regularly attend meetings in Whitmore Lake. And after the cull began in January, Silkworth says, some members started “a park monitoring program to make sure the USDA were cleaning up after themselves.” He says they found “a deer leg and tufts of fur and blood.” Then, on February 17, Ridella-Mehlos got an email from one of the volunteers:

“Tonight at 9pm on Cedar Bend Road, Celeste and I were driving and saw two young men sledding downhill into small park at base of cull zone. We approached them and they said someone from the woods told them to ‘get the hell out of here’ and they said they had heard gunfire. The two young men were startled and confused as they didn’t know anything about the cull till we told them.”

Ridella-Mehlos was appalled. “After that incident, a few of us formed a citizen watch group.” The city had closed fourteen parks and nature areas on weeknights to avoid conflicts between residents and the sharpshooters. The volunteers set up near several of them, intending to warn anyone who might stray into the closed parks.

One night, the couple stationed themselves in Island Park, which remained open, near Cedar Bend Park, which was closed. Silkworth says they saw a USDA truck drive into Cedar Bend Park–and then “an Ann Arbor police officer came up and said, ‘You’re going to have to move on.’ I said ‘No. It’s before 10 o’clock [the park’s closing time], so it’s lawful for us to be here.'”

“He said ‘OK’ and then drove off into the park and positioned his vehicle between us and the USDA vehicle,” Silkworth continues. “Then he turned his headlights toward us and turned on both of his spotlights, and as we moved he would follow us with his spotlights. I think it was intentionally to try to get us to desist.”

They didn’t. The USDA truck and the police car drove off just before the park closed. The couple followed soon afterward.

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The “Stop the Shoot” signs were distributed by the Humane Society of Huron Valley. “Here people love and respect animals,” says the group’s CEO, Tanya Hilgendorf, in her office looking out on the Matthaei Botanical Gardens. “The perspective of ‘kill this animal because it’s a nuisance’ is not something I come across a lot.

“The problem with Ann Arbor is they started with the belief that there are too many deer,” Hilgendorf continues, softly pounding a table for emphasis. “What I believe with all of my heart is that we simply have too many deer in places that some people don’t want them.”

Hilgendorf believes there are “no objective data to support a cull.” She points out that the city’s first aerial survey, in March 2015, counted 168 deer. “Even if we’re undercounting by half, we are still not at what is considered by the MDNR [Michigan Department of Natural Resources] to be the biological carrying capacity for deer in a community.”

It’s true that the city doesn’t know how big the local herd is. But city spokesperson Lisa Wondrash points out that by the time another aerial survey was taken this February, the sharpshooters had killed fifty-one deer–yet the flyover spotted 202. A dozen more were taken before the cull ended.

Based on the aerial surveys, says Dave Borneman, the city’s point person on the cull, “it seems like [the herd is] increasing.” But MDNR deer specialist Chad Stewart says the size of the herd “doesn’t matter. What dictates management is what people are willing to tolerate.”

Sabra Sanzotta would tolerate a lot. “I love the deer,” she says. “I don’t consider them dangerous or harmful.”

Last August, Sanzotta moved with her husband and daughter to a house in the hills off Huron Pkwy. “We lived in downtown Detroit for about a decade,” the Realtor explains, “and we go every day to Detroit, so we’re kind of Detroiters.”

Sanzotta’s anti-cull activism “started with the Observer,” she says. “I took out a couple ads in the late summer and early fall, and we heard from a few really passionate people.

“First, we started doing demonstrations at City Hall. It didn’t really do anything. I felt the only way to have an impact was to do a legal challenge.”

She says they came up with a name for their group, Ann Arbor Residents for Public Safety, as an umbrella for the plaintiffs in their federal lawsuit. “We have fifteen plaintiffs: U-M professors and doctors and dentists and myself.”

The lawsuit was an epic fail (see box, below), but Sanzotta remains passionately opposed to the cull. “I’m against the use of violence to handle any issue,” she says. “I’m also for data. We had a purely political issue handled by politicians. Nothing scientific was ever considered.”

Wondrash, the city’s spokesperson, says there are good reasons to thin the deer herd: “to decrease negative human-deer interactions and support biodiversity.” The human interactions include vehicle collisions with deer and concerns about the potential spread of deer-borne diseases. The biodiversity argument is based on deer’s hearty appetite for local plants.

Sanzotta dismisses that argument. “Seriously? It’s just shrubs, OK? There is no law that allows the type of hunting they’re doing. We don’t tread all over our laws because some shrubs have been nibbled!”

But a cull isn’t legally a “hunt”–the MDNR calls it “nuisance animal control.” And Borneman, who is deputy manager of the city’s Natural Areas Preservation unit, says the herd is eating more than shrubs. “We’ve seen deer browse trillium, wild geranium, and also young oak seedlings such that we don’t have them growing in the parks where there are deer,” he says. “These plants have been part of our ecosystem for thousands of years, but our oak forests will not survive because the seedlings will all be eaten by deer.” The cull’s chief advocate, a group calling itself the Washtenaw Citizens for Ecological Balance, makes the same argument (see “Our Deer Are Mostly Ann Arborites,” February 2015).

Hilgendorf isn’t buying. “It is really hard to determine a single factor in risks to certain [plant] species,” she writes in a follow-up email. “Why are we just blaming the deer? Rabbits also eat those same plants. Are we going to cull the rabbits too?”

Sanzotta and Hilgendorf also dismiss concerns about disease. “In Washtenaw County, not only do we not have locally derived Lyme disease, we are not under threat of Lyme disease,” says Hilgendorf.

“We see maybe seven or eight deer,” says Sanzotta, looking out at her home’s wooded setting. “They look really sleek”–to her, proof they’re well-fed and healthy.

“I would not expect them to be diseased,” says the MDNR’s Stewart. But “we’ve found chronic wasting disease in Ingham County, and that’s not far away.” Lyme disease isn’t here yet, either, but its range is also expanding–“I would anticipate it [reaching Ann Arbor] in a couple years or a decade.”

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There were fifty-four deer-vehicle collisions reported in the city last year. Most of the deer either died in the crash or were badly injured and killed by law-enforcement officers. So it appears that motor-vehicle accidents killed almost as many deer last year as the cull did.

Two people were also hurt, but Hilgendorf says her understanding is that the injuries were minor. She says lower speed limits could reduce the number and severity of collisions, as could better driver education: “You have to know that when you see one you’re going to see another. You have to be aware of what’s happening at the side of the road.”

Neither the police nor Huron Valley Ambulance track how serious the injuries are in deer-car crashes. But according to AAPD records, more are being reported lately–there were twenty-three in 2011 and thirty-four in 2013.

Hilgendorf still isn’t buying. “I do not believe the integrity of those recent numbers,” she emails. “We have seen no such increase in our own numbers–we provide sick and injured wildlife services to the entire county. Our deer calls have remained relatively flat since 2009.”

Like Hilgendorf, FAAWN’s Silkworth says one year of shooting was more than enough. “There were a lot of nonlethal measures that could have been taken that would have reduced the negative impact.” Nonlethal measures that have been suggested in the past include contraception, sterilization, and forbidding people from feeding deer. But the city has already banned feeding, and the MDNR’s Stewart emails that “sterilization and contraception have never proven successful at reducing free ranging deer populations. ‘Successful’ contraception programs are all island or confined situations that do not mimic free ranging deer.”

Told Stewart’s response by email, Silkworth replies by retracting his statement about nonlethal measures–but adds that he’d still like to see more aerial surveys and better documentation of deer-car crashes and deer-inflicted damage to public and private property. He suggests “deer proofing” yards by planting species deer don’t like, lowering speed limits, and requiring “landscaping be moved or cut back 15-20 feet from the road to improve visibility in all areas.”

If none of that works, his last resort would be “a well-planned and comprehensive ovariectomy [sterilization] program. I believe that lethal means should only be employed within the city in cases of animal welfare and of public safety, and in those situations, the deer should be killed as humanely as possible by law enforcement.”

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The cull is over now–but just for this year.

“City council designated $90,000 over a two-year period,” says Wondrash. “From the beginning, we said the cull would not be conducted in a single year. We didn’t get these problems in a single year, so the plan is for the next three years.” But while the funding is in place, city council would still need to approve a new contract before another cull could occur.

That means the cull can be stopped, if enough votes change on council. That won’t be easy, since only Mayor Taylor opposed the cull last time.

The mayor’s objections are both ethical and esthetic. “I believe that the extended closure of parks, the discharge of weapons in parks, and the killing of deer in parks is contrary to the ethos of our community,” he says. He also believes the cull “substantially materially degrades many residents’ feelings of safety and comfort in their homes and their view of the city.”

Taylor thinks his colleagues could be persuaded to change their positions. “We’ve seen the nature and depth of resident opposition and discomfort with the cull,” he says. “This is new information that I believe could be sufficient to change people’s minds.”

It probably won’t be for Ward 2’s Kirk Westphal. “I voted in favor of staff’s management plan because I feel they ran a robust public process and sought advice from wildlife management experts,” he emails. “I realize it’s out of fashion to defer to experts–call me old-fashioned.”

Nor will it likely work on Fifth Ward rep Chuck Warpehoski. “I’m an environmentalist,” he emails. “As I reviewed the scientific evidence, I was convinced that deer, absent predation pressure, overpopulate, and that overpopulation leads to decreased biodiversity in natural areas.”

But Ward 1’s Sabra Briere might change her mind. As she wrote her constituents in March “Now that the City’s deer cull is completed, I hope we all–especially City staff–turn our attention toward the non-lethal population control options.”

Council also has two new members since last fall–and both Ward 3 rep Zack Ackerman and Ward 5’s Chip Smith are anti-cull. Smith emails that he believes that “it really is against our collective culture to fire guns in our parks.” He also sees deer as a distraction from “other priorities. We’ve had three bike fatalities in the last year and haven’t had a discussion to improve bike safety that even nears the amount of energy that’s gone into the cull debate.”

In February, cull opponent Bob McGee told city council he was launching a petition drive to ban future culls. That apparently went nowhere–after initial email contacts, McGee went silent in early March. Sanzotta tried a petition of her own, to recall Kirk Westphal, but her proposed language was rejected. So she’s changing her tactics. “The best use of my energy would help to find and support a new slate of candidates for the next election,” she says. “I believe [some] councilmembers are beyond redemption. I would like to see Kirk Westphal ousted. Chuck Warpehoski needs to go for sure.”

FAAWN’s Silkworth says he is considering a run against Warpehoski. If he decides to, though, he’ll need to move fast: at press time, he hadn’t yet pulled petitions, and has only until April 19 to submit them.

As a nonprofit, the Humane Society can’t endorse candidates. But last fall, when Sally Hart Petersen made the cull an issue in her challenge to Second Ward councilmember Jane Lumm, the group did send out a pre-election message urging its supporters “to vote for the animals who cannot speak and cannot vote!”–with a link to a political action committee that endorsed Petersen and Ackerman.

Hilgendorf has faith the cull will be stopped. “I don’t believe this community has the stomach to accept this violent resolution,” she says.

In a later email, she adds, “I’m pretty sure the 2016 deer cull is going to go down as one of the dumbest things this City has ever done.” The upcoming election season will determine if she’s right.

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A legal slapdown

“Do we have to wait for a baby to get shot, for the blood to be on this Court’s hands?”

That was Barry Powers’ ardent plea at a January hearing before the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. The attorney hired by Sabra Sanzotta’s Ann Arbor Residents for Public Safety had already watched city, state, and federal lawyers blow holes in his arguments for a temporary restraining order to halt the cull. According to the hearing transcript, his melodramatic speech sat no better with judge Arthur Tarnow.

“You may sit down,” Tarnow replied. “Your performance here is very consistent with the way you have handled this whole litigation. You are shooting from the hip, no pun intended, and you are making statements that if you were a better listener you would not make.”

The judge was just getting started. “The sense I have from reading your pleadings and your difficulty even filing the suit in the first place is that you have not taken the time to do the research. I asked you to sit down because you were getting close to being in trouble by making the cable television arguments that the blood is on the Judge’s hands.”

Tarnow went on to demolish Powers’ arguments. “There is nothing in what you have presented that creates an imminent danger of somebody being shot. It appears that the State of Michigan, the city of Ann Arbor, and the Federal Government have been very careful to minimize the danger.”

Though he denied Powers’ temporary restraining order, Tarnow didn’t shut him down entirely. “I will not dismiss the case. I would like to hear a response in writing to the state’s claim.”

Powers tried one more time for an immediate halt. “I beg this Court, please don’t put these people at risk because their lawyer did not do a good enough job. I have, I believe, a right to an evidentiary hearing where I can put Ms. Sanzotta on the stand. She would testify that she is mentally ill because of this and it’s causing her physical illness.”

“Part of that may be because of what she is being told that isn’t based on the reality,” the judge replied. “You can just stop.”

Powers didn’t. “We had to spend hours and thousands of dollars in legal fees on this.”

“They should return the legal fees,” snapped Tarnow. “I have seen a demonstration of a lack of civility that I have not seen in a long, long time. And I am not even going to go into what your obligations are to your clients so that they are not intimidated or in fear because they are hearing misinformation.”

City attorney Stephen Postema says Powers never submitted the written response. The case was dismissed.

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Calls & Letters, May 2016

David Silkworth didn’t waffle

Deer-cull opponent David Silkworth emailed that a quote from him in our April feature (“I Love the Deer”) gave some readers the mistaken impression that he had “waffled” in his commitment to nonlethal methods for resolving human-deer conflicts.

“The questions [the Observer] asked to me and to the MDNR deer specialist were very different with understandably different responses,” Silkworth wrote. He retracted an initial verbal statement about nonlethal methods only to expand on it by email—not because he’d lost faith in their efficacy. Silkworth continues to believe, as we wrote, “that lethal means should only be employed within the city in cases of animal welfare and of public safety.” He’s taken out nominating petitions to challenge pro-cull incumbent Chuck Warpehoski in August’s Democratic primary.

City attorney Steven Postema also emailed that a federal lawsuit against the cull remains active—we wrote that it had been dismissed. In mid-April, judge Arthur Tarnow had yet to rule on the city’s motion for dismissal, or on the plaintiffs’ request for a stay pending the outcome of a related suit in state court.