Dick Johnson’s op-ed piece in the Sept. 30 Gazette pointed to the one simple way to reduce tick-borne diseases on Martha’s Vineyard: reduce the number of deer. Sounds simple.

His commentary in the Gazette of Friday, Oct. 7, again points to the same solution.

It could be simple. Since deer were reintroduced here after World War II, the deer population has been regulated by the state to produce one result: the maximum harvest of deer year after year. Our deer season may well be one of the best examples ever of regulation working and achieving its goal. Having large animals to hunt for sport and food made sense in the 1940s. Lyme disease, babeseosis and the other tick-borne diseases were unknown then, and deer were only pests to those trying to grow plants.

It is a different world today and the role of the deer as a disease vector is better understood.

So what are we going to do? We have been asking the state to decrease the deer herd and within the framework of deer as a sustainable hunting crop, the state has tried. The shotgun season went from one week to two; the crossbow and the primitive firearms rules have been relaxed, and the result seems to be more deer than ever.

There is a better way. We can stop calling deer a game animal and declare them vermin, in the same category as rats or English sparrows. It is legal to kill rats any way you want, day or night, with a gun or a trap. There are no rules other than reasonable public safety rules. If we use the same criteria for deer, the population would quickly drop to a manageable level. The rules are in place to protect the deer so we can kill them for sport, and those rules are making a great many of us very sick.

The next time you, a friend or a family member has a tick-borne disease, think how easy it would be to change the rules. We do not need a whole new bureaucracy to solve this problem we just need to move the existing bureaucracy out of the way.

Chris Murphy
Chilmark