permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

On 4/17/06 10:36 AM, "chauncey williams" <chaunceyfree@yahoo.com> wrote:


> I encourage everyone to think beyond simple fences and beyond to a more
> natural awareness to the way the rest of life that we share this earth  with
> tend to live.

If there's anyone out there who has had good, long-term luck with any of the
gentler methods, particularly in the West where the mule deer are even more
aggressive than the eastern ones, I would love to hear of it. But I rankle a
bit at suggestions of "sharing" and the implication that we fence builders
are unaware beings living on some lower ethical plane, unless those
suggestions are backed up with experience.

Deer have as strong a desire to feed themselves and their young as any other
animal. They are intelligent and persistent. It is is contrary to nature to
ask deer to deny themselves a good food source that is easily available. I'm
not sure that the human concept of sharing is something that hungry deer
subscribe to; otherwise why would they take every single apple on every
tree, every lettuce plant, every raspberry bush?

I designed a hedge with deer food like wild plums, cherries, etc on the
outside, and grafted varieties facing our house. This was an enormous
investment in sharing the place I lived. Worked great for about 3 years.
Then the deer discovered the better food on the inside, and stopped eating
the wild stuff. They broke through it to get to my fruit trees.

I tried peeing to mark the territory, religiously renewing the spots nearly
every day. Hah. I tried talking to the deer. I set up special places for
them to feed. That just attracted more deer. I planted borders of things
they didn't like to eat. They trampled them on the way to the food. I
interspersed non-edibles among edibles. They ate the edibles. Sometimes a
method worked for a while, but only, I observed, when there was ample wild
food. In the scarce season, they came for my garden. That's the truth about
nature awareness: they are very aware of where food is, have all day and
night to look for it, and will not voluntarily go hungry. Why would they?

I consider myself a good animal communicator, and as sensitive and
compassionate, and as good a pattern and life-cycle observer as I can
manage. I tried every single method of sharing/hiding/protecting etc. my
food crops as I could think of. I read all the books. In the long run, I
lost many young fruit trees--the deer simply broke them down. I had gardens
completely ravaged, berry bushes torn out of the ground. The only thing that
actually worked was a stout fence, supplemented later by a dog. I loathed
the idea of a fence, but my choices finally became: continually lose my food
supply or build a fence.


Toby