Bowhunting to Begin at Mt. Airy Forest?

Cincinnati City Manager Milton Dohoney is floating the idea of allowing bow hunting of white-tailed deer in Mt. Airy Forest and other Cincinnati parks.

We say "three cheers" at least three times.

The SWNID estate is plagued with these overgrown urban pests. With nearly 100 per square mile in Cincinnati's woodlands, deer regularly traipse through our neighborhood, browsing on all the good and lovely plants placed at personal expense in our yard.

Most ironic is this: two autumns ago we purchased from the Hamilton County Parks Department a tulip poplar seedling. Said tree, once vigorously growing, is now dead at every point more than six inches above the ground, its tender bark having been cruelly stripped by marauding deer whose eerie, unblinking, vacant stares are unresponsive to all attempts to scare them away. Now perhaps another agency of local government might allow the proper harvesting of these protein factories, restoring our bucolic urban ecosystem to something resembling a balance and allowing us to replace the now pathetic shrub with something that has half a chance of survival.

The city has been regularly shutting down the park at night and paying sharpshooters to kill deer. Bowhunters will work for free. In our experience, it doesn't take a sharp shot to hit these beasts, who won't flinch even if charged by a man with a dog on the leash. Bowhunting would be easy, not especially challenging but certainly effective. Even slingshots would probably do the job.