Hunting a Solution to the Bambi Boom

Insight on the News, July 3, 2000 by Sean Paige

In many parts of the country the deer population has grown out of control, causing tens of thousands of deer-related car crashes and the destruction of natural habitat.

It was a postcard-perfect Saturday in May, ideal for a drive in the country, but the American dream that was unfolding for one Northern Virginia family was about to take a detour into the twilight zone. One moment, Manjit Teneja, his wife Rajinder and their three teenage children were exiting Interstate 95 for a serendipitous excursion to nearby Lake Anna; in the next, they were state-police statistics, hardly knowing what hit them when a charging and panicked deer careened off a van driving ahead and came crashing through the front window of their Toyota Camry.

"When the deer struck the van, I saw it kind of moving toward me, but I had no clue he was going to come and hit us" Manjit Taneja said in the accident's aftermath. "The next thing I remember was my ... daughter crying loudly, `Dad, we are hurt! Dad, we are hurt!'"

But 19-year-old Baninder Taneja, riding in the backseat and headed back to the College of William and Mary to start a summer research project, was more than just hurt. The decapitated deer's head had broken through the windshield and struck the girl whom family and friends called Bonnie, fatally injuring her, before smashing through the back window and landing on a car driving behind. A biology major who recently had been accepted by the Eastern Virginia Medical School, Bonnie was described by her father as "both beautiful-looking and beautiful at heart." But she had become one of a growing number of casualties in an exploding clash between man and nature.

Many other Virginians -- and an increasing number of motorists across the United States -- are experiencing grill-crunching encounters with the nation's burgeoning deer population, resulting in a growing number of human and animal casualties. Here, as elsewhere in the land, booming growth, increased traffic and very large numbers of deer are creating a costly and controversial clash, not just between man and animal, but also between factions and interests squaring off over what to do about it.

In 1997, the Virginia Department of Transportation recorded approximately 600 deer-related crashes; by 1998, the total had jumped to about 4,000. In some areas of Virginia's Central Piedmont region, 25 percent of households have reported being involved in an accident with deer in the last two years, according to a report by the state's Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.

But insurance and law-enforcement officials say the actual number of such collisions in Virginia could be somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 annually. "We really just don't know how large a problem it is," concedes a Virginia wildlife manager, echoing the words of many state officials Insight interviewed.

The U.S. insurance industry estimates that there are about a half-million car/deer encounters annually, with an average cost to insurance companies of $2,000 per claim. Statistics compiled by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, indicate that 162 human fatalities resulted from animal/automobile collisions in 1998, up from 142 fatalities in 1997 (which saw an 11 percent increase from 1996's total of 139 fatalities), 95 percent of which involved deer, according to an insurance-industry expert.

Additionally, animal and vehicle collisions resulted in an estimated 13,000 human injuries in 1998, according to NHTSA, and 247,000 instances of property damage -- numbers that also have seen sizable and steady increases in recent years.

Now as renowned for its mounting number of deer kills as for its dairy products, Wisconsin is just one among many states attempting to come to grips with the "Bambi boom." According to statistics released in April, the number of people killed or injured in accidents involving deer in Wisconsin reached an all-time high last year. Six were killed and 841 injured from deer-related collisions in 1999, according to the state's transportation authority -- a 7.4 percent increase over 1998, and the highest toll in the 22 years in which records have been kept.

Wisconsinites reported colliding with deer at least 44,000 times in 1998 (though the actual number could be twice that high), and more than half of reported crashes in five Wisconsin counties are deer-related, according to state figures. The situation is so bad in Marathon County, the state's largest, that at least a half-dozen police cars are damaged there by deer each year.

But the toll isn't surprising, given predictions by Wisconsin's Department of Natural Resources, or DNR, of a fall deer population of 1.7 million, topping the state's 1995 record of 1.66 million -- the result, say experts, of a succession of mild winters. In 1998, vehicle/deer crashes cost the people of Wisconsin between $81 million and $160 million in medical expenses, damaged vehicles and added law enforcement, according to a "conservative" estimate in a study commissioned by the Wisconsin Insurance Alliance.