IRON MOUNTAIN — The deer are going to be killed. Unless something changes, unless someone steps forward to say they’ll take these flawed animals, the deer are going to be killed.
And some people think that dying is better than how they now live.
There’s a public park in the city of Iron Mountain, and inside that park there’s a pen in which about 17 deer spend their days. It was set up as an attraction 75 years ago by city leaders, back when corralling some animals inside a fence and inviting the public to look at them was considered adequate.
But times have changed.
Last summer, the U.S. Department of Agriculture visited the pen and ordered the city to upgrade it, citing inadequate shelter, the absence of an assigned veterinarian, the lack of a separate space within the enclosure to treat and examine deer for disease, and the inadequacy of their drinking water — a small pond which often freezes over and which also serves as a toilet for waterfowl.
The initial cost for these fixes would’ve been about $22,000, with annual maintenance of around $16,000, a notable expense for a city the size of Iron Mountain, population around 7,500. A few people managed to fundraise most of the initial amount needed, including an offer of donations and manpower from the Michigan Laborers Local 1329 union.
The issue, though, was about more than money.
“If this was how animals were kept in a zoo, that zoo would have been closed down years ago,” said Iron Mountain City Council member Kyle Blomquist. “It wouldn’t have been acceptable. It was just something that was grandfathered in and largely flew under the radar for generations here in Iron Mountain. And it’s just unfortunate that a part of what a lot of people remember about City Park will be gone permanently. But ultimately, it was decided by this council — and not lightly — that it is a deeply inhumane condition to keep the deer for as long as we have in this situation.”
So last week, the City Council voted 5-2 to close the pen down for good.
“Some people feel that having a so-called ‘deer prison’ doesn’t make any sense in a city that is literally littered with deer,” said City Council member Mark Wickman, who voted to shut down the pen. “And that was basically why I voted the way I did. I thought it was kind of a waste of resources to spend money to keep something that, in my view, is just cruel and not necessarily an attraction. It was just an ethical thing.”
Diane Luczak, who regularly spoke out at council meetings against the pen, was relieved to see it finally close.
“It’s too small for the number of deer that are in there,” she said. “Their water source is a filthy, putrid pond that ducks and geese crap in constantly. In the winter, it’s frozen over. And they’ve been inbreeding for years. You have dads breeding daughters, sons breeding mothers, brothers breeding sisters. It’s ridiculous.”
But what to do with the deer themselves?
Releasing them into the wild is out of the question, since they’re essentially domesticated and have no survival skills. Castrating the bucks so the herd could gradually die off on its own, as some suggested, would still require costly upgrades to the pen in the meantime. Calls were made to wildlife sanctuaries, asking whether any would take the animals, but the deer have serious health problems that few people want to deal with.
“It’s a deeply inbred population,” Blomquist said. “We’re not able to import new deer, and that has led to some of them to have ‘elf foot’ and respiratory diseases and other things. You know, if we could just take down the fences and reintroduce them into the wild, that’s what we would do. Nobody on the council’s position is that we want to destroy the deer. But that’s effectively the only option that’s available to us.”
And so, in a matter of days, a man with a rifle will shoot them where they stand.
There was an immediate outcry after the vote. Residents by the hundreds expressed outrage on social media. Someone came one night and cut a hole in the pen’s fence to free them, but the deer are so docile they didn’t even try to leave.
Iron Mountain resident Desiree Stafford started a GoFundMe to raise money to save them. “Somebody has to be a voice for these deer,” she said. “They’ve been there for over 75 years. They don’t deserve to die. If we can’t get conditions better at City Park, then at least bring them somewhere that will be better.”
A metro Detroit animal welfare group posted an appeal to its members, who reacted accordingly. “I’ve gotten blown up with this from eight or nine people in the last hour,” City Manager Jordan Stanchina said last week, fielding phone calls. Council members noted that after the kill, the venison would be donated to local food banks. But that was small consolation to opponents.
“This is crazy with all these people,” said Luczak, who’s worked in a no-kill animal shelter for more than three decades. “What do they not see? The deer are just put in there like cattle, a wild animal that you can see every day of the week in anybody’s yard. But they’re not looking at the picture of the stress that these animals are under. People have to think of the animal first and what they’re all dealing with. And you have to use your brain instead of your heart a lot of times.”
And yet.
No matter how sickly the deer, nor how dire their situation, some people simply could not stomach killing them.
Even though the herd was regularly culled over the years to keep the numbers down, and even though deer are routinely harvested inside city limits to reduce the population roaming the neighborhoods — including 110 taken out by bow just last year — some people consider these deer different. Their longtime enclosure in this pen has granted them an affection not afforded those outside the fence.
“I’d like to find some place to put them,” said Mayor Dale Alessandrini, who voted against the motion. “I don’t mind if we’re going to close that pen down. I don’t have a problem with that. I have a problem with killing all these innocent deer is what I have a problem with.”
“Since I was little, this park has been a refuge for me,” said Caroline Sullivan, a member of Friends of Iron Mountain City Park. “I come here and watch the deer. It hurts me to think that this decision was made so flippantly. It’s completely a sad situation.”
She cited the last time the herd was culled. “The guy didn’t use a silencer, he started shooting. What happens to a herd of deer when you shoot? There was chaos, and the first one that he shot he didn’t kill, so it ran around and it was bleeding all over the place. So I have a problem with this.”
There still might be hope for the deer, though.
A week after the vote, Stanchina was haggling with the Department of Natural Resources, which won’t allow the deer to be removed alive from the pen to avoid possibly spreading disease, and was calling farms and sanctuaries to see if someone, anyone, would take these animals if the DNR relents.
“We’re still exploring ways of what could be done,” he said. “Because, obviously, that’s the route we’d like to explore if it’s a possibility.” But under state regulations, the city’s hands, so far, seem tied.
Meanwhile, on a cold winter’s day, people walking their dogs stopped to watch the herd. Now and then, a skier glided quietly past on the sculpted trails. And the deer huddled tight on the snowy hills beneath the pines, unaware of their flaws, oblivious to their fate.
Alessandrini stood and watched them from the other side of the fence around the pen. Others have been moved to save the deer by the nostalgia of childhood visits here, or by the sportsman’s revulsion against shooting a caged animal. For him, it was something simpler.
“I’m a deer hunter. But in the last, I don’t know, probably, eight or 10 years, my mind’s changed,” he said. “I mean, I have a deer camp, and my kids hunt, but I kind of don’t hunt anymore. I don’t know if I just got older and you get soft-hearted or what the hell. But I just don’t want to kill these deer.”
John Carlisle writes about Michigan. His stories can be found at freep.com/carlisle. Contact him: jcarlisle@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @_johncarlisle, Facebook at johncarlisle.freep or on Instagram at johncarlislefreep.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Inbred deer herd at U.P. public attraction set to be killed
Reporting by John Carlisle, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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