Nov 29, 2022 3 min read

Pennsylvania’s rifle deer-hunting season, an annual rite of late fall, is underway.

It is an exercise that tests perseverance and patience, observation and tracking skills and physical endurance in dealing with less-than-ideal temperatures as well as an array of possibly adverse, quickly changing weather conditions.

Like other sports, hunting does not guarantees success. However, it can produce wonderful results, even if actual hunting success is not achieved.

What we are alluding to is when it helps revive or bolster positive relationships within families and with friends and others.

Hunting also is a learning experience regarding the interesting “secrets” that wooded areas shelter. What that means is that, while in the pursuit of game, hunters have the opportunity to gain valuable knowledge and understanding about environmental issues and concerns affecting forestlands and the various animal populations.

Veteran hunters, even most hunters with much less experience, understand that hunting is not without issues of concern. Perhaps sometime in the future, the young hunters of today will provide the vision and foresight for substantial improvements to the hunting experience – improvements that their fathers and grandfathers would have savored.

One of the obvious problems that needs to be addressed is visible every year on or along numerous roadways in this region during the weeks leading up to rifle deer hunting’s opening day.

It is the deer killed in collisions with vehicles.

An insurance industry report indicates that Pennsylvania led the nation last year in animal-collision claims – that the odds of a Pennsylvania driver hitting a deer or other large animal has been determined to be about 1 in 58.

November is the top month for deer-vehicle collisions for a number of reasons, including cooler autumn weather that provokes increased deer activity, as well as the peak of the rut, the breeding season for deer.

It is a shame so much meat is lost as a result of collisions with vehicles. It is meat that would be a godsend for hundreds, if not thousands, of needy families, if it were available to them by way of traditional hunting.

No doubt many people – especially drivers who have been involved in collisions or near-collisions with deer – wonder why science has not developed a non-expensive, non-toxic, environmentally friendly repellent capable of widespread application to keep deer from highway rights-of-way where they are a danger to humans’ lives and well-being as well as their own.

Then there are the residential neighborhoods that serve as year-round sanctuaries for sizable populations of deer, because the deer cannot be hunted in those settings.

Residents who have experienced property damage as a result of that circumstance no doubt agree that those deer should not be accorded such protection – that there ought to be a vigorous initiative implemented to make those deer available to hunters in a traditional hunting environment.

Hopefully, area hunters will have a productive hunt this year, but they should be thinking about hunting’s issues as well, and offer their thoughts to the state Game Commission anytime the opportunity arises.