A necessary move to reduce an exploding deer population, or a tragedy waiting to happen? This is the conundrum coinciding with the impending inaugural deer hunting season that begins next Friday, Sept. 15 at four town-owned open spaces.

The answer to that quandary, as you might imagine, depends on who you ask.

Advocates say risk is negligible
In a letter sent out to abutters of all four properties that will become part of the new hunting cooperative entered with the Department of Environment Management (DEM), the Town of Bristol emphasized that all hunters entering Town property must pass a hunting safety course, acquire a hunting license and permit for deer hunting, and acquire a separate archery proficiency card from DEM. There is also signage being posted that visitors to these areas must wear bright orange to further prevent the potential for an accident.

The Town cited some statistics in said letter to attempt to put people at ease regarding the frequency (or rather, the infrequency) with which hunting accidents occur in the country.

“To put hunting’s safety into perspective, compared to hunting with a firearm, a person is: 19 times more likely to be injured snowboarding; 25 times more likely to be injured cheerleading or bicycle riding; 34 times more likely to be injured playing soccer or skateboarding; and 105 more times likely to be injured playing tackle football,” the letter states.

And as you read, those stats relate to hunting with firearms. Bow hunting, according to Dylan Ferreira, DEM’s Principal Wildlife Biologist who advocated for the hunting cooperative during multiple sessions with the Bristol Town Council in past months, is exponentially safer.

“A hunter will be up in a tree stand being as quiet as they can and as still as they can watching the woods, waiting for a deer to come. They will hear or see the deer come from 50 yards away usually. Because they’re using archery equipment, they can’t shoot through brush or trees. They have to wait for a perfectly clear shot, usually around 20 or 30 yards,” he said. “Hikers make much more noise than deer. You’ll usually hear and see people from a lot farther away. They’ll know instantly that it’s a hiker or a person.”

Ferreira, who has been hunting for about 15 years, said that the majority of accidents that happen in hunting occur to the hunters themselves, such as in motor vehicle accidents going out to a site or from falling out of tree stands.

“Archery hunting is very safe and the chances of someone who is not involved in the hunting, a bystander or a non-hunter, getting injured is near zero,” he said.

Safety concerns remain for some
Elizabeth Coderre has lived on Elmwood Drive in the area of The 100 Acre Woods for about a decade. She frequents the walking trails in the town-owned land near her home, especially in the fall and the winter with her dog, when she finds the area the most beautiful.

“I just am stunned and, frankly, outraged that this parcel of land is now completely being taken over. And it’s putting the public in a position to take their lives into their own hands,” she said in a recent interview. “It's like enter at your own risk.”

Coderre said that she feels utilizing the area, which was set aside for conservancy and use by the general public (but is not limited to those recreational uses), feels wrong to her, and she is concerned that eventually, something bad will happen. To her, all the regulations in the world won’t deter an irresponsible hunter.

“It all depends on the responsibility of who’s out there,” she said. “If you have a responsible hunter, great. But what if someone has been drinking while they’re waiting for a deer to come out there? And someone is out there walking, and ‘oops.’”

While Coderre said she is prepared to take the necessary precautions, such as wearing orange during the hunting season, she can’t kick the concern that a child or teenager unaware of the fact that hunting is going on in the area might wind up in the crosshairs of a tragedy.

“I'm not so much worried about me as I am people who might just be in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she said.

Coderre also said that as deer are targeted in the hunting areas, she feared it would cause more deer to run out of those areas and into the surrounding streets, boosting the likelihood for more car collisions.

It should be noted that one of the primary reasons for initiating the deer hunting program in Bristol was in response to the number of deer-on-car collisions occurring in town. Bristol has experienced among the highest rate of such collisions in the state.

More facts about the hunting program
Bristol’s hunting cooperative is the 13th such agreement in Rhode Island. The cooperative permits bow hunting on four public parcels (scan the QR code in this story to see maps of each area). There is a 200-foot buffer enforced between all residences near the hunting areas.

Hunters are permitted to take two antlered deer and three antler-less deer (meaning juveniles of either sex, adult females or young males with antlers less than three inches long) for the entire season. Hunters can come from any part of the state to hunt in Bristol provided they have all the required certifications and licenses.

Hunters are permitted to harvest kills from the area in which they are killed, which caused another Elmwood Drive resident, Bill Marshall, to posit that people will be seeing deer guts all over the place. Ferreira expressed optimism that hunters would recognize their surroundings and not leave a kill on a clear walking trail.

“I think all of our hunters will know this is a pretty urban area and try to be a little but more sensitive here than other places,” he said, adding that many hunters prefer to transport the deer from the kill site and harvest it at their own homes or a butcher shop.

In the possible scenario that a deer is struck by a bolt and runs out of the hunting area and onto private property, Ferreira said that the hunter should call the DEM law enforcement division to help them get permission from the private property owner to collect the deer.

“Generally speaking, when enforcement gets involved most private landowners will allow them access,” he said. “Nobody wants to see a deer go to waste.”

Perhaps most important to the context of this article, the Town of Bristol bears no liability for hunting accidents that might occur as part of the cooperative hunting program. That responsibility falls to the state, per the agreement with the Town and DEM.

“Hopefully the residents of Bristol can rest assured that this was thought out and done for the right reasons,” Ferreira said. “We want this to be done safely and effectively. And we’re doing this in response to there being too many deer in Bristol, and the effects of that are harmful to people, such as tick born illnesses or collisions.”