On April 28, 2025, the Farmington Hills City Council approved a resolution to conduct a deer cull to reduce the city’s “overpopulation” of deer. Only Council Member Michael Bridges voted against the baseless resolution to annually kill deer. The Council cited “increased public safety and public health concerns” to justify the killing of deer in the city. The Council referred to “increased deer-vehicle collisions, destruction of . . . residential landscapes, and potential exposure to diseases” as the basis supporting its claim that the deer must be killed to protect their residents.(1)

For 10 years, the city has failed to take any meaningful action to resolve their residents’ deer concerns. It is questionable that the City Council has now made an informed decision to kill the deer based on their residents’ wellbeing. The city decided, in 2014, to begin the deer management process. In 2015, the city staff began conducting research, collecting data and working with the Michigan DNR. The only action the city took was, in 2017, by enacting an ordinance prohibiting residents from feeding the deer. During the past decade, if the city was so concerned about residents’ “potential exposure to disease”, why didn’t the city implement an annual program to educate its residents on how to prevent tick bites infected with Lyme disease.(2) And if the city was so concerned about “destruction of residential landscapes”, why did it state on its deer management website page that the city “is not responsible for any issues caused by wildlife” in residents’ yards.(3) In 2021, the city led a regional approach to resolve deer conflicts by using only lethal measures with the establishment of the Southeast Michigan Urban Deer Coalition (SMUDC). The DNR then collaborated with the SMUDC, in 2024, to establish an updated State Urban Deer Management Plan which only promotes the lethal reduction of the deer population.

The city has failed to implement any reasonable nonlethal measures, prior to 2025, consistent with the DNR’s 2016 Urban White-Tailed Deer Conflict Management Policy and Procedures which recommends nonlethal measures to resolve deer conflicts before the last resort use of firearm sharpshooting to reduce a deer population. Apparently, the City Council, as advised by city staff, did not believe there was a deer related traffic safety issue to warrant any action for 10 years. If there was an issue, the city could have implemented an effective comprehensive education and communication plan to help motorists to avoid deer vehicle crashes (DVCs) and used temporary dynamic seasonal deer crossing warning signs at road DVC hotspots as did the City of Rochester Hills. In 2024, there were 133 DVCs in Farmington Hills which has approximately 35,000 households with 70,000 registered vehicles. Thus, only 0.4% of resident households would have had a family member involved in a DVC which rarely results in any injury to a vehicle’s occupants. The City Council instead chose the implementation of lethal measures as the measure of first resort. The DNR acknowledges the use of lethal measures in suburban communities is “polarizing” among the residents and recommends communities “estimate support before beginning lethal removal, as these approaches can be controversial.”(4) The use of lethal measures is highly divisive among residents with strongly opposing beliefs about deer. The City Council chose to not determine if a significant majority of residents supported their resolution to cull the deer.

According to their resolution, the City Council relied only on the research conducted by the DNR to justify their decision to cull the deer.(5) Their reliance was flawed because the DNR has an inherent institutional bias toward supporting hunters’ interests because the agency’s significant dependence on funding its Wildlife Division’s budget from hunting licenses, permits and excise taxes on hunting equipment. According to the DNR 2016 Michigan Deer Management Plan, the agency has a main goal to promote “deer hunting to provide quality recreational opportunities” with its stated objective to work with “local governments to consider [archery] hunting as the primary tool to address urban/suburban deer issues.”(6) When a local government requests DNR advice on how to reduce deer conflicts, the agency recommends the best approach for long-term deer 2 management, where hunting is not allowed, is the yearly use of lethal methods of managed hunts or, if not feasible, of firearm sharpshooting.(7)

The DNR’s strong bias toward only lethal measures prevents it from recommending sterilization of female deer to local governments even though the agency has concluded deer sterilization has been scientifically proven effective in reducing deer populations at a localized scale. The DNR referenced a scientific study by DeNicola, A. J. and V. L. DeNicola (2021)(8), which was conducted in several communities including Ann Arbor, to support the agency’s conclusion.(9) Local governments should be able to compare the projected total cost of endless annual deer culls with the overall yearly sterilization costs which are significantly reduced after a high percentage of female deer have been sterilized in proximity to deer vehicle crashes (DVCs) hotspots. The DNR stated it would review future sterilization permit requests as a localized management technique as deemed appropriate.(10)

The DNR misrepresents to local governments, because of its established bias, that nonlethal measures are only effective short-term while lethal measures are effective long-term without any scientific studies to support such a conclusion.(11) When advising local government officials on urban wildlife issues, such as deer conflicts, the DNR, as wildlife trust managers, are obligated to give them “transparent, objective and impartial” advice which is based on a sound scientific basis.(12) However, when the DNR provides advice to local governments on safety related deer concerns, the agency fails, before doing so, to collaborate with subject matter experts from Michigan’s traffic safety and public health safety agencies. The DNR fails to provide local governments any peer reviewed scientific research studies which provide a scientific consensus that lethal measures are effective in the long-term to reduce landscaping damage or the incidence of Lyme disease throughout a densely populated area of suburban/urban residents. For example, the DNR cherry picked only one study by Kilpatrick et al. (2014)(13) for presentations that the incidence of Lyme disease cases will decline with a reduction in deer density. However, the DNR failed to state that Kilpatrick et al. (2014) concluded that deer density would have to be reduced to 13 deer per square mile. According to Curtis (2020)(14) , that deer density result is not practically achievable throughout a suburban community’s landscape with home ownership of small segmented parcels of residential property.

The DNR is not qualified to recommend lethal measures to decrease DVCs in cities because DVCs increased statewide an average of 10% for the past five years based on the DNR’s failed policy to only promote hunting to decrease DVCs by reducing the state's deer population. Deer related accidents are primarily a traffic safety issue and not a just a wildlife issue. Furthermore, DVCs are not random events(15) and can be prevented. When the DNR set its five-year priority goals for its Wildlife Division, the agency failed to include any traffic safety goals or objectives for the reduction of the DVCs for the state or each county.(16) The state had a yearly average of 50,763 DVCs from 2015 to 2019. The subsequent yearly average of 55,887 DVCs from 2020 to 2024 was an 10% increase in DVCs.(17) In 2023, the number of DVCs in 53 counties with mostly rural areas averaged 52% of all accidents in those counties where local governments have the fewest ordinances restricting hunting.(18) In the 30 counties with mostly urban areas, where hunting is more locally restricted by local governments, the number of DVCs comprised only 13% of all accidents.(19) While DVCs were increasing for the past five years, the DNR made no effort to determine what effective traffic safety measures should be executed to aid motorists to avoid DVCs.

The majority of the City Council members relied on and misrepresented the results of a flawed 2022 SEMCOG online opinion survey to support Resolution No. R-85-25. Research on online surveys has shown that this manner of obtaining responses will produce inaccurate, unreliable and biased data results which will not be an accurate representation of a larger population’s point of view.(20) The resolution stated that “approximately 73% of Farmington Hills residents . . . have concerns related to deer overpopulation”. Even if the SEMCOG 3 opinion survey was a reliable opinion survey source, this statement is not accurate because the survey did not ask if residents thought there was an overpopulation of deer or even had concerns related to deer overpopulation. The survey only asked what changes in the deer population they had seen and what described their feelings about deer. Only 43% of respondents had specific concerns which were primarily related to DVCs, landscaping damage, Lyme disease and ticks. The City Council selectively failed to state in the resolution, or during their public meeting to approve the deer culling, that 72% of surveyed residents, with or without concerns, enjoyed seeing deer.

The majority of the City Council members should reconsider their flawed decision to cull the deer, seriously consider the objective opinions of unbiased subject matter experts to resolve deer conflicts in the city and listen to the majority of their residents who oppose the use of endless yearly lethal measures to kill deer.

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(1) Farmington Hills City Council Resolution No. R-85-25

(2) See Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (2023) Ticks and Your Health – Preventing tickborne illness in Michigan.

(3) City of Farmington Hills website page, Deer Management – Deer Proof Your Garden

(4) Michigan DNR (2016) Urban White-Tailed Deer Conflict Management Policy and Procedures, at page 1, Michigan DNR Managing Deer Within Suburban Communities at page 3.

(5) City of Farmington Hills City Council Resolution No. R-85-25.

(6) 2016 Michigan Deer Management Plan, at pages 17 and 20.

(7) Michigan DNR, Managing Deer Within Suburban Communities

(8) DeNicola, A. J. and V. L. DeNicola (2020) Ovariectomy as a management technique for suburban deer populations. Wildlife Society Bulletin 45(3): 445‐455. See also the detailed results of the sterilization project at CliftonDeer.org.

(9) Michigan DNR (2022), Final Report on Sterilization of Game in Michigan at page 2.

(10) Ibid. at page 3.

(11) For example, see 2016 Michigan Deer Management Plan, at page 25.

(12) Mason, R. and B. Rudolph (2015), The Value of Science to state wildlife management, Proceedings of the National Wild Turkey Symposium 11:39-44.

(13) Kilpatrick HJ, LaBonte AM, Stafford KC. 2014. The relationship between deer density, tick abundance, and human cases of Lyme disease in a residential community. J Med Entomol. 51(4):777-84.

(14) Curtis, P.D. 2020. After decades of suburban deer research and management in the eastern United States: where do we go from here? Human-Wildlife Interactions 14(1):111-128

(15) Marcoux, A. and Riley, S. (2010) Driver knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes about deer-vehicle collisions in southern Michigan. Human-Wildlife Interactions 4(1):47-55.

(16) Michigan DNR, THE GPS GUIDING PRINCIPLES AND STRATEGIES Wildlife Division Strategic Plan 2021-2026

(17) Michigan OHSP, Michigan Traffic Crash Facts 2015-2024.

(18) Michigan OHSP, Michigan Traffic Crash Reporting, 2023 Year End Traffic Crash Statistics, Deer Involved Traffic Crashes, at pp. 50-52 and Total Crashes by County, at pp. 14-16. Rural counties determined based on the Census Bureau's urban-rural classification.

(19) See footnote 18.

(20) Duda, M.D. and Nobile, J.L. (2010) The Fallacy of Online Surveys: No Data are Better Than Bad Data, Human Dimensions of Wildlife, 15(1):55-64.