Someone is Slaughtering Florida's Key Deer

Count on Florida for every excess of the real estate meltdown. Miami New Times picks up a story out of the Florida Keys: someone is slaughtering the diminutive key deer on Big Pine Key.
Like the spotted owl and the snail darter, federal protections for the key deer in the Florida Keys have long been the target of a pro-business, anti-environmental bias undergirding Chamber of Commerce enthusiasm for paving over the state.

New Times reports: "This past November 9, a Port Pine resident phoned authorities to report a dark truck had slammed into a deer on Park Avenue. When Steven Berger, a muscular cop with a salt-and-pepper crewcut, arrived on the scene, he immediately suspected foul play. For one, there were marks where the driver had turned suddenly off the asphalt toward the doe. Then there was the gory scene. ..... No sooner had that scene been cleaned up than a far more mysterious case took shape. On December 16, a half-mile away in an empty lot on Landers Street, behind a stand of acacia, milkweed, and sea grape, a neighbor discovered the three skulls. They were in a circle, about seven feet apart.

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"Finally, on January 16, a third neighbor was driving at night near the corner of Coconut Palm Street and Kyle Boulevard, about 250 feet from the nearest home, when she spotted a fallen deer... Schmidt found a long and distinctive spear - of the sort shot from a spearfishing gun - had pierced the right side of the deer's neck."

What kind of person shoots a key deer with a spear fishing gun? Someone who is either insane, or, consumed by anger.

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The key deer have been in the cross-hairs of development interests for decades. Florida Keys property rights advocates wrapped in the American flag, the Constitution, and conservative Republican politics used the key deer as a poster child to rile up residents about development interference in development.

Back in the late 1980's, wise use movement activists from the Rocky Mountains--funded by wealthy sugar barons--used the key deer as a rallying cry to stifle environmental protection throughout the state, putting regulators on guard and environmentalists on the defensive.
The Florida Keys fragile environments are the tail that wags the Everglades "dog". Big property owners, sugar barons, and land speculators reserved the right to convert swampland into sugar cane, or sugar cane into rock mines, or rock mines into "lakes" for town homes: they weren't going to let a little deer to gain traction in the public imagination, not when Bambi made such a good freaking target.

So Mr. Beal would need to be corrected: there isn't "any more" that is going to happen, not after the record of the last 30 years.
The only change on Big Pine to account for the senseless murdering of key deer is the same change that is affecting the Florida Keys and the whole state of Florida: the worst collapse in real estate since the Great Depression.

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Key deer found killed; species is endangered, January 23, 2008

Wildlife officials are investigating the killing of several endangered Key deer, the tiny deer that live exclusively in the Florida Keys.

In one incident last month, a Big Pine Key resident found three severed Key deer heads on federal property.

In a second incident, a deer was found alive but with a three-foot-long spear in its neck. The deer had to be euthanized last week. Investigators do not think the incidents are related.

A count conducted in 2001 found approximately 700 of the deer. Killing Key deer is a crime under the Endangered Species Act and punishable by fines or jail time or both.

Miami New Times
By Chuck Strouse


No one knows how key deer came to dwell in the continental United States' southernmost spit of land. The dog-size animals, which weigh less than 90 pounds, might have been chased here by the spread of glaciers. They were first described by a shipwrecked Spanish explorer in the 1550s.

After oversettlement of the Keys and other pressures trimmed the population to only 50 in 1939, Florida banned their hunting. The 8,400-acre refuge was created in 1957. It was overseen by an insanely cool ranger named Jack Watson who shot holes in poachers' gas tanks. Ten years later, after Congress placed the tiny deer on the endangered species list, the herd's numbers began swelling.

Now these relatives of the Virginia white-tailed deer are among the top ecological success stories of all time. They live on Big Pine, No Name, and several other nearby keys, and number almost 1,000. They're affectionate and will walk up to you and eat from your hand.

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