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Even though neighborhoods are built for people, lots of wild animals also call these places home. You might have seen a squirrel, a fox, or a deer munching on your garden or running down your street. Living near people gives some animals food and places to live, but it can also cause problems for both animals and people. Sometimes people do not agree about what to do about the animals that live near them. We were curious about how people and wild animals live together and decided to investigate. We studied how people make decisions about deer in the suburbs of Massachusetts, where some people think there are too many deer and others are not so sure. We discovered that people often disagree, and politics matters. Paying attention to this disagreement can help people work together and make choices that let wild animals and people to live together with fewer problems. 

The Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937 was a transformative piece of legislation for wildlife management and conservation in the United States, incentivizing the creation of state wildlife agencies and establishing funding mechanisms for these agencies. The legislation directs an excise tax on firearms, ammunition, and archery equipment to a fund to support wildlife restoration projects by state wildlife agencies. In 2021 alone, this generated more than $1 billion in project funds. Although commonly framed as a user pays model of conservation whereby hunters fund wildlife management, most of the excise taxes collected on firearms and ammunition are now associated with non-hunting uses. Despite this disconnect, many firearms industry groups continue to support and promote their relationship to Pittman-Robertson. Here, we examine the role of Pittman-Robertson in shaping the relationship between firearms and conservation and seek to understand how this relationship is reproduced. We examine this shifting relationship through an analysis of amendments to Pittman-Robertson since its creation and a discourse analysis of contemporary materials from web sites of firearms, hunting, shooting, and conservation organizations. Drawing on the concept of environmentality and diverse ecologies, we argue that Pittman-Robertson has contributed to the production of, and been re-shaped by, a distinct environmental actor: the eco-munitionary subject. 

Municipal governments are emerging as important stakeholders in managing the populations and geographic distributions of whitetailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) in urban and suburban areas of the Northeastern United States. To understand the variation in municipal- level concerns about deer and municipal policies related to deer management, we distributed a questionnaire to all 351 municipalities across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 2017 (response rate = 74%) and collected data on local bylaws that influence hunting access. We found that concerns about deer vary across the state and some municipalities are taking action to manage increasing deer populations. In particular, our analysis established the importance of deer and deer management in the suburban regions of Massachusetts, while uncovering many local differences within similar suburban areas. The varying relationships between deer populations, public concerns, and municipal actions illustrated the complex role of municipal decisionmakers in shaping wildlife management programs. 

This paper examines the implementation of a white-tailed deer management program in the Blue Hills Reservation outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Drawing on the concepts of biopolitics, we explore how white-tailed deer became an object of concern and ultimately targets of lethal management in this suburban park. Through interviews, document analysis, and observation of public meetings, we examine the changes in and controversy over the presence, perception, and management of deer in the park. We argue that the implementation of the deer management program is only partially explained by the growing numbers of white-tailed deer, and must also be understood in the context of concerns about human health and shifting imaginaries of urban green spaces and global biodiversity. The case illustrates the entanglements of harm and care in the management sub/urban ecosystems and highlights how differences in the ethical and ontological understandings of deer create tensions in efforts to advance multispecies urban planning.