Malliotakis Offers Sensible Alternative to de Blasio

Malliotakis Offers Sensible Alternative to de Blasio’s Costly and Inefficient Deer Vasectomy Program.

 

As city officials continue budget negotiations and the de Blasio administration pushes for more than $2.5 million for another five years of deer vasectomies, Malliotakis is reiterating her suggestion that the city shifts to a more effective and less costly alternative to control the deer population.

 

Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis has written to Mayor de Blasio suggesting that the city focus its deer population control efforts on the sterilization of female deer as opposed to the current vasectomy program which she says “was designed and implemented without true consideration for the nature of these animals and their reproductive patterns.”

 

Malliotakis points out that the design of the current program neglects the fact that if even just a handful of males are left without being sterilized they can go on to impregnate the entire female population, making it almost impossible to significantly curb population growth by those measures alone. This simple fact makes the current vasectomy program an ineffective means to control Staten Island’s deer problem and comes at an extremely high cost to the tax payer.

 

After researching methods used in Ohio and Hastings on Hudson and Cayuga Heights in New York, as well as consulting with experts and reading studies done by researchers at Tufts and Cornell Universities, Malliotakis is proposing that the city shift its focus to a 15 minute procedure that is at least twice as effective and more than half the cost than that of the vasectomy program currently being used.