Changing Attitudes toward Killing Deer, and Everything Else

The Post has an article today on the increasing popularity of violent deer control in the suburbs of Washington. One bow hunter noted that while in the past suburban hunts were met with protests, now "people offer us lunch." More:

“They can’t get here fast enough,” said Ty Tydings, an area resident who ran over a deer last year, has had to slow down to avoid four more this year and is tired of seeing his shrubs get eaten. “Everyone is pretty sick of deer.”

Tydings’s views underscore a continuing shift in public mood as governments in the area — faced with alarming deer populations — have organized deer kills and opened up hunting closer to suburban neighborhoods. In many of these places, the debate often centers not on whether to shoot, but on how best to shoot. “We certainly are experiencing a turn of our citizens’ opinion,” said Bill Hamilton, head of wildlife and ecology for Montgomery County’s park service.

I find this interesting as a sort of object lesson in how people's politico-moral attitudes are shaped by real-world experience. Sometimes it seems that in politics nothing ever changes, and we keep refighting the same battles forever. But people clearly do change their minds about the sort of issues governments face every day, sometimes quite quickly. But how and why remains hard to pin down. What everybody says about acceptance of homosexuality and gay marriage is that it was the massive coming out of the 80s and 90s that drove the change, when people discovered how many of their friends and relatives were gay. This personal experience overrode theoretical objections to homosexuality.

In the case of deer, two things have happened. First, the biologists have gotten more and more insistent that big deer populations are an ecological menace. It is pressure from the biologists that has shifted attitudes in the National Park Service and, I suppose, state and local park services as well. Eco-activism works best when it combines real scientific issues with personal emotional concerns --nimbyism, fear of mysterious chemicals, love of cute animals -- and on the deer issue the scientists are all on the side of control. There is also personal experience. People support deer control after they run into a deer on the road, or after deer ravage their yards. More broadly, now that people can see deer every day, they have ceased to be wild and magical creatures, and from close up you can see that many of them are stunted and mangy.

Contemplating this, I have wondered what it would take to change Americans' minds about economic issues, and I end up discouraged. First, there is a large group of economists, politicians and pundits who are determined to defend low taxes on the rich as "pro growth," despite the lack of evidence that there is any connection. Could this be overcome by personal experience? Maybe, but I doubt it. Most Americans who want jobs have them, and when they lose them, who gets the blame? I think it is just as likely to be the government as the plutocrats. The move from personal economic experience to wanting a change in government policy has to be mediated through some kind of theoretical framework, which means people are likely to blame whoever they feel like blaming. So it will be very hard to convince more people that there is a link between increasing inequality, middle class stagnation and libertarian economics.