Pittsburgh will draft 30 archers to hunt overbearing deer population

The City of Pittsburgh will be randomly selecting 30 archers to go bow hunting in two city parks in an effort to control the deer population. 

“In cooperation with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the City of Pittsburgh is preparing for a pilot program with archery-controlled hunts in Frick and Riverview Parks during the 2023-2024 deer archery season,” said a Sept. 3 release from the City of Pittsburgh.

Frick Park is 644 acres, while Riverview Park is 259 acres, said the Pittsburgh Parks website. 

Anyone who wishes to hunt in one of the parks will enter a lottery system, said the city, and 30 people will be selected. 

To be eligible, a person must live in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, have a clean criminal check and Pennsylvania Game Commission background check, and purchase an antlerless deer permit for Pittsburgh’s wildlife management unit area. 

After being selected from a lottery and passing the background check, “the selected archers will be required to attend an accuracy test,” said the city.

“If the accuracy test is passed, each hunter will be assigned a Hunter ID number and a specific location within Frick or Riverview Park where they are permitted to hunt,” the city added. 

Hunters selected for the program will have a “zero-tolerance” policy — and will be immediately removed from the program if they are found to have violated any program guidelines, said the city.

Additionally, each hunter must shoot a doe (a female deer) as their first kill. The doe then will be donated to a food bank. 

Archers who shoot more than two deer from their area of the park “will be given preference in subsequent seasons,” said the archery program rules and procedures form. 

Hunters are not permitted to use bait — and cannot publicly share pictures of their harvests, per the city. 

In a “frequently asked questions” section of the website, the city explained that the deer population has grown out of control and has become dangerous to themselves and to humans.

“Maintaining a healthy deer population is critical to both the park’s health and deer herds’ health. The large deer population has exasperated their food source, limiting native vegetation’s ability to root and regenerate,” the website said. 

“With no natural predators, we are seeing an increase in car-deer collisions, relentless damage to our ecosystem, and unnatural aggression toward pets and people.”

Frick and Riverview parks have the largest unregulated deer population, the city explained. 

Further, the decision to start this program was made after an uptick in the number of deceased deer found in parks. 

“In 2018, Pittsburgh’s Animal Care and Control picked up 335 deceased deer, and in 2021 Animal Care and Control removed 510 deer,” they said. Deer populations double every two to three years, said the city. 

Deer are also hosts to ticks, which carry diseases, notes the USDA. 

As the goal of the archery program is to control the deer population, “requiring a doe first best helps us meet that goal,” said the City of Pittsburgh.

Does are able to breed when they are six months old, and 98% of the mature females breed each year, the city also said.  

“A doe can produce one to two fawns each year and occasionally triplets. Eighty-five percent of births are twins and triplets,” said the city. 

While there are ways to control deer population without resorting to hunting, those methods would not be effective in Pittsburgh. 

A single-shot multi-year immunontraceptive drug for deer called GonaCon is not available for use in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the city said, and the existing deer population is already too large.

“Fertility control is often employed in conjunction with deer herd reduction techniques and will not help reduce the already overpopulated herd size,” the city said. 

Fox News Digital reached out to the City of Pittsburgh and the USDA for additional comment.