55 deer killed in Rock Creek Park culling help feed homeless, hungry

WASHINGTON — The operations were conducted at night. The targets, in the words of a federal agency spokeswoman, needed to be “reduced.”

Earlier this month, 55 deer in Rock Creek Park were reduced — or, in the parlance of ordinary people, killed — as part of the Rock Creek Park White-tailed Deer Management Plan. And the mission had a payoff: On Tuesday, the National Park Service donated the deer meat — all 1,700 pounds of it — to DC Central Kitchen, which gives out 5,000 free meals per day to 80 nearby homeless shelters, transitional homes and nonprofit organizations.

Jenny Anzelmo-Sarles, a National Park Service spokeswoman, said culling Rock Creek’s deer population is essential to protect the park’s long-term health. Deer eat tree seedlings and other vegetation, depriving other wildlife of food and shelter and imperiling the forest’s viability.

“If the forest can’t continue to regenerate, then Rock Creek Park as we know it will cease to exist,” Anzelmo-Sarles said. “While it sounds very euphemistic to call it a reduction or an operation, this isn’t hunting. This is truly a scientific-based management plan and management action.”

She said the shooters are biologists with the Agriculture Department who go out at night with park rangers to cull the deer. “These guys are the experts at doing this. They have an incredibly high success and safety rate,” Anzelmo-Sarles said.

Such deer harvests have prompted outcries across the region. Two years ago, an animal rights group and several local residents sued the Interior Department in federal court in Washington. The court ruled in the government’s favor in March 2013, but the activists are appealing, according to Anzelmo-Sarles.

The National Park Service says the deer population in Rock Creek Park has gotten smaller, but it’s still double the size it should be.