Student Lucy Lu hands out deer whistles to two of her peers outside the STAMP Student Union building on campus.
One of CFACT’s founding principles is “for people and nature too.” This means that we need to steward the Earth, but we also need to protect the livelihoods and needs of humans.
A student takes a deer whistle and flyer. There are 1 million car accidents with deer every year.
Far too often radical greens pursue a “for nature only” strategy. At the University of Maryland in College Park, MD, students decided distributing deer whistles to their peers would embody the “people and nature too” belief perfectly.
200 people die every year from deer to vehicular collisions in the United States. The free market, through technological innovation, has developed a possible solution to these tragic deaths with deer whistles. When placed on the grill of a car, some studies have found that a deer whistle will make a sound that only deer can hear, making them freeze before they enter the road as your car passes by. This is a great potential solution to save deer lives and protect humans without impacting habitat or roads.
Lucy and CFACT’s National Director of Collegians Adam Houser pose in the middle of performing outreach on campus with deer whistles.
“It’s very important to both protect animals and save the lives of people,” said Lucy Lu, a senior at the University. “This is an easy way to start doing that. We gave away all our whistles really quickly! I think the students were very receptive to it.”
The deer whistles were tested by Business Research Group in Bellvue, Iowa, along with 8 other models on the market. Save-A-Deer whistles were found to be 92% effective at freezing (stop moving) the deer. It was tested in Iowa on White tail deer, Wisconsin on white tail deer, and Colorado on mule deer.
Deer to car collisions cause $1 billion in damage every year. Deer whistles show that you don’t always need the government to solve every environmental problem in the world.
