VICTORIA -- The District of Oak Bay is looking forward to finding out how effective its experimental deer population management program is after the first contraceptive vaccines were deployed last year.
“We’ve gone from the pure research now to actually being able to apply it and measure the results and that’s quite exciting,” said Oak Bay Mayor Kevin Murdoch.
Last year, 60 does were given an immune-contraceptive and now officials will be checking to see if the process actually worked. Meanwhile, district staff will also be administering a booster contraceptive to those same deer, and any does that were too young to receive the initial dose in 2019.
“The hope is that it was very effective and that those deer won’t be having any births," Murdoch said. “And if that’s the case, then obviously the population should start to decline.”
He hopes to prove that the contraceptives are an effective alternative to a controversial cull that saw 11 deer killed in in the community in 2015.
“If we can demonstrate that this actually is effective, I would very much like to see us expand the program so that other jurisdictions are able to start implementing immuno-contraception without having to go through quite the same number of years that Oak Bay has had to go through for all of its research phases of this,” Murdoch said.
Recently, Oak Bay received just over $42,000 in funding from the provincial urban deer cost-share program, which will cover about half the cost for this year’s work on deer population management in the district.
