Awi Usdi on humaneness and human rights

Awi Usdi might sound like a terrorist but he’s not. He is male, fair-haired, six feet tall, weighs 100 kgs. His identifying mark is the characteristic white underside of his tail, which he raises in alarm to flag the other deer in times of danger. Yes, Awi Usdi is a white-tailed deer, the “most dangerous large mammal in North America to humans,” according to wildlife scientists Laura Prugh and Sophie Gilbert in the journal Conservation Letters (cited in Fox News, Aug. 11, 2016).

How can that be? We have always known the white-tailed deer as Bambi, Walt Disney’s 1942 animated film hero, the lovable fawn whose mother was killed by a deer hunter. We watched Bambi grow into a majestic stag who soon had to step into the shoes of his father — the benevolent, peaceful King of the Forest. Is not the Bear or some ferocious other mammal the King of the Forest?

Long before the colonization of America by the white men with their bows and arrows, the Cherokee Indians had made a statement on the respect for the environment and the balance of nature in the folktale of Awi Usdi, leader of the white-tailed deer clan. Awi prescribed peaceful negotiation with the human hunters in lieu of the grizzly Bear clan leader’s proposition to kill the humans with the same weapons of bows and arrows. Respect the natural order, Awi Usdi said to the human in a dream — you can kill for food, but only what you need — just as predator animals kill only for food.

If you destroy the natural order, you will be “crippled,” Awi Usdi warned the humans. “Crippled” was, and is symbolic of the grave consequences from the degradation of the environment by humans, from the lack of respect for nature — the poaching, pilfering (e.g., excessive mining, fishing, deforestation for lumber) and the pollution; also from misuse and overuse of natural fossils for fuel and energy; and the direct and outright mutilation of Nature by blasting and burning for land reclamation, as examples.

In a cruel twist of Fate, not without the doing of humans, the white-tailed deer are now the focus of ire in America, where these deer have alarmingly grown to 30 million in the last decade. There have been more than one million deer-vehicle collisions from deer venturing out of the forests, annually an average of 200 fatalities and $4 billion in damages; the number of confirmed cases of Lyme disease has doubled and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever has quadrupled in the last 20 years. Young tree seedlings, particularly of the iconic but disappearing American fir are eaten up by herds of browsing herbivore deer, tripling planting costs and reversing reforestation efforts. The natural habitat of other animal species has been destroyed, or at least greatly altered, disrupting the biodiversity ( nature.org, Aug. 5, 2015). Scientists note the widespread declines of North American songbird populations that prefer to nest in the shrub and intermediate canopy layer,

now too thin to give the needed shade ( nature.org, Aug. 22, 2013). But humans forget that tampering with the balance of nature did not start with the animals, which may be the purer of God’s creation.

And so America has been on a campaign, for at least the last 10 years to cull the overpopulation of the prolific deer, whose damage has escalated in the last two years. The plan of the National Park Service has been to reduce the population to 15 or 20 deer per square mile from the 80 per square mile in 2012 ( spectator. org, May 23, 2012). But deer management cannot be regulated at the federal level, as it has been specified since 1896 by the Supreme Court that states have ownership of their wildlife ( nature.org, Aug. 22, 2016). There are conflicting views in the 46 states and some 39,000 local governments, and heated debates among communities on how the killing of the deer should be done, if the deer should be killed at all ( Ibid.). Even non- lethal remedies such as relocation of the deer and/ or sterilization of does ( female deer) are controversial: Ithaca, New York succeeded in sterilizing 95% of does over a five-year period but still the local deer population remained stable, as did the damage they caused. In some states like Texas, sterilization of deer is illegal, being not humane ( Ibid.) N. B.: Sterilization of does costs $ 1,000/ head, as reported on YouTube.

And the story of the culling of the deer comes ironically full circle to the Cherokee folklore on Awi Usdi, who pleaded with the human in the mythical dream to be humane and respect the natural balance of Nature. The childlike doe did not do it to herself to be a menace to humanity by multiplying beyond control, in the absence of natural predators on her that the humans have preempted to kill to satisfy inhuman greed and vanity. As if to add punishment to the innocent, wildlife scientists suggested that deadly 220- lb. cougars be let loose in the forests of New York and New Jersey, calculating that a single cougar may kill 259 deer over a six-year lifespan (Fox News, Aug. 11, 2016).

While the proponents of “large carnivore recolonization” admitted this could lead to attacks on humans, pets, and livestock, “the number of lives lost would be far less than the number of lives saved,” the scientists argued (Ibid.). It is shocking unto utter disbelief that any life lost can be deemed a pale background statistic to the vanity of having hypothetically “saved” many more faceless others. But the cougar proposal did not fly.

The story of the white-tailed deer is clearly an environmental case study not only for the stressed-out Americans, but for the rest of the world watching in on the consequences of Machiavellian disrespect and disregard of Nature and the immutable laws of symbiosis in Creation. But for those of us “not in the forest” and are able to see the dilemma with less personal fear, the moral of the story can be more hard- hitting on the basic issue of human integrity best tested by respect for each other under the canopy of God’s Providence, which includes animals and all Nature.

And in our country, we face a strangely parallel dilemma in the handling of the drug menace, in a “war” that justifies the culling of users and pushers in summary killings without due process of law. President Rodrigo Duterte, who won on a platform of eliminating drugs and attendant crimes, has vowed to maintain his “shoot-to-kill” order against drug dealers while in office and says he “does not care about human rights” (AFP, Aug. 6, 2016).

At a Senate hearing last week on extrajudicial killings, Philippine National Police Director General Ronald dela Rosa admitted that 712 people had been killed in police operations in the seven weeks since the crackdown began, and that another 1,067 had died at the hands of vigilantes. “By one account, there is official pride in the death toll,” The

Time report observed. ( Time.com, Aug. 25, 2016).

Those numbers, for the less than two months culling of suspected drug users and pushers, shame the comparatively more cautious and more humane culling of the deer menace in America.

Awi Usdi, you are more respected than you realize.