I.
One autumn evening several years ago I was driving—I should admit it, I was flying—north on New York state’s Taconic Parkway when I spotted a white tailed deer at the side of the road. It isn’t unusual to see them along the Taconic, especially in the fall, when the rut makes them a little crazy, and a lot more likely to nose into human zones like backyards, ballfields, highways. My family and I make that drive often enough that my sons are used to hearing me yell “Deer!” without warning.
But this time I said, “Oh, dear.”
And my oldest son, clocking tone, sat up in the backseat and said, “What’s wrong?”
The doe lay not just by the road but very nearly in it: right on the shoulder, a foot or two from our bumper. I remember her calm, almost sleepy expression, the way she did not flinch as our mad metal capsule hurtled by. She’d been badly banged up. Blood striped her chest and flank. Before we’d even cleared her length I understood that she’d been hit by a car and had been able to drag herself to the edge of the tar but no farther. Almost as quickly I heard myself say, partly to my son and mostly to myself, “She’ll be alright.”
But I knew it probably wasn’t true. More likely she’d be dead soon. My son seemed to understand this, too, and our car was suddenly swamped with with emotion. He was near tears for the doe, and I was upset because I didn’t know what to do. It’s one thing to see a carcass at the side of the road—the action is over. To see an animal hurt and slowly fading, that’s something else. In truth I knew there was little I could do. Call the cops, maybe try to find a number for the state department of conservation. In either case the response, if there was one, would be slow and late and would end the same way.
Much later I would learn that, legally speaking, I really wasn’t allowed to do anything for or to or with that doe. But in the moment, between my own sadness and the sound of my kid’s fresh grief, what I remember was helplessness, and the weirdly rational question that snaked up through it all: Who is responsible for this animal?
II.
It’s estimated that some 30 million white-tailed deer now roam the U.S. New York State alone is home to a million or more. The numbers have been routinely used to support a story of conservation success, and they are in fact pretty striking when you consider that only about a century ago deer had nearly been wiped out of New York and many other parts of the country. And yet, in slightly more than a human lifespan, they have made a spectacular comeback, unlike that of any other large North American mammal. At a time when other cervids—some elk and almost all caribou, for example—aren’t fairing well, deer appear to be thriving.
The reasons for this are myriad, and they mostly have to do with us humans. First, settlers killed them for the leather business and for food, beginning in the colonial era and continuing on through Gilded Age. Then, when they’d been reduced continent-wide to a shade of their pre-colonial population, we attempted to atone for the slaughter with conservation and game management. Deer also get credit for their comeback. They’re resilient and highly adaptable creatures. Synanthrope is the technical term: an animal that has learned how to exist in the human-altered world. It turns out that what they needed most was time—time to figure us out, and to fit themselves into the gray spaces that still surround us.
Today deer are our shadows, our doppelgängers, their eyes reflecting back to us from the sides of highways the choices we have made and unmade, the landscapes we have deforested and reforested, developed and abandoned. One researcher in New York recently told me that our modern way of living in America has “created perfect deer habitat. We are subsidizing them.”
And now, many researchers agree, there are too many. This is as measured by the impact they have on our forests, which in the northeast are being pushed to collapse under the braided strains of climate change, development, and the enormous appetites of deer.
III.
Long after my family’s encounter with the dying doe, she was still haunting me. I think of her more often than I’d like, and when her face surfaces in memory so does the that unsettling question: Who is responsible for this animal?
In New York, deer are not considered beings, or persons, but objects. When it comes to ownership (a term which implies responsibility), they might be considered res nullius—a Latin legal term that translates to “nobody’s thing.” But this only means that the animals do not belong to any individual person. Instead, all of them belong to all of us, the citizens of New York, and it’s legally up to the state to take responsibility for managing this common property. The state does this through a series of laws and regulations that are invisible to most people most of the time, except when it comes to interacting with deer. Humans are officially discouraged or legally forbidden from almost every kind of direct interaction with the animals. It’s possible to argue that this is intended to keep both humans and deer safe, though it gets weird when you remember that deer are objects, like toasters, or tires.
Things get stranger when you consider that one of the very few acceptable ways for a human to interact with a deer is to kill it. This can legally be done only after buying a permit. And, generally speaking, killing a deer (or “taking” it) is the only way by which the animal can be transferred from one property category to another, from an object we hold in common to one that a private person can own exclusively.
Obviously these rules and legal standards were of no use to us, or the doe, on the parkway that night. Had she been dead, we might have called a state official and tried to claim the body; I’ve read that people occasionally do this and receive permission to haul the roadkill home. But because she was still alive, she was also still an object held in common by some 20 million New Yorkers. It meant, of course, that she would remain nobody’s thing.
IV.
One of the ways that deer destroy forests is by being choosy. They prefer to eat certain things—oak saplings, maples, native wildflowers—and they keep nibbling until everything’s gone. Then the deer move on to plants that are less desirable. You can walk through many northeastern forests today and see the results: an understory that’s isn’t so much an ecosystem as it is a bare cupboard. Down below the canopy, deer have mowed down almost everything they can reach. Such forests may not seem barren at first—the big mature trees are still there, after all—but linger a while and you’ll almost certainly notice that something’s wrong. The woods are quieter, emptier, stiller. No saplings, no flowers. The big trees are being prevented from reproducing. Without small plants and flowers the birds and pollinators, along with other species, are gone. Such a forest will slowly become a kind of memorial to taste: if something manages to grow, it will be because deer don’t want to eat it.
So far there is no consensus on what to do about the deer. Hunting has traditionally been the preferred management tool. Many Americans love hunting, or at least say they do, and the hunting industry lobbies extensively to encourage management practices that keep deer populations high. But experts I’ve spoken with say there’s no way hunting alone will save forests. There are simply too many deer, and too few hunters. In New York, during the 2024-2025 hunting season, something like 223,000 deer were reduced to private property. This number blows my mind—223,000 of anything is a lot—but the state considers it a stable “harvest.” This is to say the hunting season did not significantly reduce the deer population. Even now, as I write, there are still a million or so of them out there, eating through the dusk.
I have come to think that one of our big deer problems is in classification. Because they are objects rather than, say, non-human persons, we’re never really encouraged or allowed to develop relationships with them outside the framework of killing and ignoring. They may sometimes be called pests, chewing up the yard shrubs, or they may be hazards when they leap into the road at night. But because they are res nullius, actual responsibility—the kind that would honestly wrestle with their destructive effect on the landscape—seems beyond our grasp. We seem content, as I was that day, to keep on driving.
