Ithaca is a town daffy for nature. The biggest deal in town this week was people visiting Cornell to see and sniff a big plant called the corpse plant that smells like rotting meat. The line was hundreds long.
And in Cayuga Heights, the village election today turns on the question of deer in the neighborhood.
There are two parties. New Heights is incumbent and wants to shoot deer. Village Matters are challengers who are against sharpshooters patrolling the place.
Our guess is that the pacifists will prevail. We hope they will.
To gun supporters, we say, peace, but please, get realistic. The shooting is never going to happen. Besides everything else, such as brutal and dangerous, it is too expensive.
If New Heights wins, and tries to start blasting, there will be a lawsuit the village can't afford.
If somehow a Super PAC or something came forward to pay for a deer-shooting defense, it still wouldn't happen. Any activity planned would be met, and stopped, by activists out in force.
Not just local activists, but from all over the country. Picture hundreds of orange-vested, placard-holding people standing in a plot on Hanshaw Road where an announced culling was to have been. Media trucks all over. Rifles that can't be fired.
Good luck to the Village Matters candidates, and to the residents of Cayuga Heights in creating a plan for living with nature without shooting it.
Steve Burke
for Ithaca NY Blog
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