For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. And for each marksman’s bullet that has targeted a deer in Lake County, Prairie View resident Davida Terry has fired a shot back at the forest preserve.
Ever since the forest preserve implemented its deer-management program in 1989, Terry has campaigned against what she calls Bambi blasting, becoming the principal mouthpiece for the deer of Lake County.
“I always had this love for things that live,” Terry said, explaining how she first became involved. Four years ago, neighbors notified Terry of the county’s plans to cull deer. “This did not have any great impact on me when I first heard it,” she said, explaining that she merely associated the plan with hunting. Nevertheless, she began speaking with forest preserve officials on behalf of her neighbors and became angered when she felt they paid only lip service to the concerns, she said.
In a last-ditch effort to save the deer, a group of concerned citizens banded together and gave birth to the Concerned Veterinarians and Citizens to Save the Ryerson Deer, the predecessor to the Ryerson Deer Foundation. The coalition obtained an injunction against the forest preserve, and the court allowed the group a few weeks to move as many deer as possible. The members went on a fundraising binge and collected more than $55,000 in donations in three weeks, according to Terry. With that money, the coalition relocated about 30 deer to a wildlife preserve near Peoria. After that, the Peoria preserve refused to accept more because of overpopulation.
Since then, Terry has continued to spearhead the movement to obviate the deer-culling program. She maintains that her endeavors do not stem solely from her love of wildlife, and she rejects the notion that she is an animal-rights extremist. Instead, she said, the issue is fundamentally political and has become a contest between “us” and “them.”
Terry is disgruntled because she thinks the forest preserve cannot adequately account for all the deer it kills. She contends that the site objectives used to determine how many deer the preserve can support are scientifically unfounded and that the aerial counts are also faulty.
“The understory (plant life of the forest community) would not disappear if they did not go on culling every year. It will survive.” Though she acknowledged that deer do damage the forest’s plant life, she questioned the extent of the damage as reported by the forest preserve. She also argued that damage not only results from deer but also from pesticides, population growth, pollutants and the mosquito-abatement program. “Even if we kill every deer for 100 years, the nature preserves will not be what they are today,” she said.
“I believe in part of what they’re doing. It’s important to manage our preserves and manage our ecosystem in there. It is not necessary to kill deer every single year. It’s ludicrous.”
Recently, Terry was appointed to the wildlife advisory committee of the Lake County Forest Preserve Board. In that position, she hopes to achieve some sort of compromise with the board and said she will struggle to become more objective. “I’m very ego-involved in this. It becomes very difficult to separate yourself from the issue.”
Protests and legal challenges may have failed so far, but Terry said she won’t give up: “If I walked away from it, I would have no peace with myself.”
