Oh, Deer

A female white-tailed deer has an average summer weight of 100 pounds, and a buck averages 150 pounds but can weigh twice as much. Handling and transporting a deer in distress isn’t just difficult — it’s dangerous. Until recently, for their own safety and to alleviate the suffering of the animals, trained wildlife rescue volunteers were allowed to administer xylazine, a veterinary anesthetic. Xylazine subdues an injured deer so it can be moved for treatment or to be humanely euthanized.

But xylazine, which has the street name “tranq,” is also popular with drug dealers, who mix it with opioids, such as fentanyl, a combination that compounds the risks of using the drugs.

The State Department of Environmental Conservation recently advised the Evelyn Alexander Wildlife Rescue Center in Hampton Bays that the nonprofit’s volunteers and wildlife rehabilitators could no longer administer xylazine, citing “longstanding limitations on rehabilitator licenses and appropriate protocols.” The DEC described administering xylazine as akin to practicing veterinary medicine, which is more than a licensed wildlife rehabilitator is permitted to do.

But the risks of transporting a deer without xylazine outweigh the risks of transporting a deer with xylazine, so it’s unclear what this change aims to accomplish or what problem is it intended to solve. The unintended but obvious consequences are that deer will needlessly experience prolonged suffering and volunteers may put themselves in harm’s way.

For volunteer-reliant organizations like Evelyn Alexander Wildlife Rescue Center, it’s simply not an option to send a staff member licensed in veterinary medicine to every call of a deer in distress. The center gets between 200 and 300 deer calls a year and has only one staff member who fits the DEC’s criteria.

The center has never handed out xylazine willy-nilly. “We have volunteers trained for deer rescue specifically,” said the center’s executive director, Kathleen Mulcahy. “They know how to tranquilize a deer using xylazine. It’s not a controlled substance — we get it through our veterinary advisor.”

Though xylazine has been somewhat co-opted by drug dealers, it remains a vital tool in the deer rescue toolbox.

The DEC’s enforcement of this policy may be well-intentioned, but taking this option away from wildlife rescuers abruptly while offering no suitable alternative is not the way to go about this. Tighter controls on who can access and administer xylazine could have been put in place without pulling the rug out from under the Evelyn Alexander Wildlife Rescue Center and others.