“In 1906, fifty white tails from Michigan’s remnant herd were delivered to Pennsylvania and released in specially created refuges there. Eleven years later, Pennsylvania’s deer managers were being blamed by commercial foresters, farmers, and orchard owners from “too many deer.”Aldo Leopold, a US forester conservationist, asserted that in 1931 Pennsylvania had an estimated 800,000 deer but a habitat capacity for only 250,000. In the winter of 1935-36, one biologist reported, anyone who wanted to take a walk along some mountain streams could see fifty to one hundred dead deer in less than a mile. They had starved to death” (Sterba 98-99)

I think this quote really illuminates how large the white tailed deer population explosion was. It puts a disturbing image in people’s heads, which sometimes, is the only way to get them to do anything.

“We went up north because that’s where the deer were. I assumed that’s where they belonged. I associated them with the pine forest and cedar swamps up there, a place that looked natural and unspoiled, certainly wilder than the open country where we lived in the southern third of the state” (Sterba 99)

This quote really made me think about how the deer lived in the woods we now inhabit thousands of years before our civilization came and ripped their homes apart. The deer were here long before humans. We just assume that the deer like to live in the woods upstate, rather than humans kicked them out of the regions they once inhabited.

“Meanwhile, the magnificent white-tailed deer, a visual treasure to behold, becomes a long-legged rat” (Sterba 117)

This quote highlights that we value certain species more than others. Why is a rat seen as less valuable than a deer? It is all in your perception of the rat that makes it something bad. If you can change the way you see the rat from a pest to a furry little fat creature, your view of it completely changes.