Above is a photo of a deer afflicted with cutaneous fibroma, a common and painful disease afflicting overpopulated deer herds.
Let me tell you a story about what happened in my country. In scottland, deer hunting was the local sport that paid for the management and ecological protection of our forests, until the nitwits in Edinburgh decided that organized deer hunts on privately managed land should be made illegal.
With the income from the deer stalking gone, the land was no longer managed, the deer population massively increased because there were no natural predators thanks to the Brits hunting the english wolf to extinction. As a result about ten years later the deer population in the scottish forests was so overgrown that they were mostly sickly and dying with massive epidemics running through the population.
The short of it is, eventually the military had to go in with automatic rifles to cull the population, they were hauling massive dumptrucks worth of carcasses out of the woods for disposal, and the folks at Edinburgh had the gall to charge the locals for the entire operation.
So...in your case the he Massachusetts Department of Fish and Game and the Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) has decided that rather than have government agencies cull the deer for valid environmental health reasons they would rather sell permits, make a bit of money, and have regular hunters do the work for them, and the people over at "Stop the Deer Hunt in Massachusetts!" petition say they shouldn't let that happen, let the problem fester and then have your state government go in with the national guard and increase your local taxes as a result.
The choice is simple Massachusets, balance out the nature preserves ecology now and make a bit of quid for your state government, or wait a few years and have to have the military go in and kill the deer and end up with a tax increase.
