Trouble in store for suburban deer

February 25, 1996

The Star Tribune

Here's how it's looking for Minnesota deer these days:

Conditions for the up-north deer seem to be improving. The Legislature is about ready to buy $750,000 worth of food pellets. According to the backers of the feed-the-deer emergency act of '96, hundred of Minnesotans will rev up their snowmobiles and roar into the woods, hauling chow to the deer so they can be kept fat, happy and alive – until next hunting season.

But the outlook isn't so good for suburban deer, particularly Minnetonkan deer. In Minnetonka, about $60,000 is budgeted this year to kill the cursed pests.

To make matters worse for the Minnetonkan deer, their defenders are on the run. And to make matters still worse, the deer savers are running without their boots, because their boots were confiscated in a big bust.

Minnetonkan police, who are working overtime to protect deer slaying operations, scored at 3 a.m. Monday when they stopped a little hatchback cruising down a street not far from a swamp where deer are being trapped.

In the car were three deer savers. Two of them, 47-year-old Bobbi Rudh and 59-year-old Cecelia Constantine, were locals. Certainly, police were happy to arrest the two on suspicion of violating Minnetonka's deer-trap law.

But it was the arrest of the third person in the car that has the hearts of some deer slayers pumping excitedly. That their person was none other than Steve Hindi, who may look like a typical suburban businessman but who in fact is the Steve (Shooter) Hindi from Plano, Ill.

What Shooter does is go around the country secretly shooting video of people doing cruel things to animals. In Illinois, Shooter got video of officials trapping deer in DuPage and Cook counties in "rocket nets," then disposing of them with a bolt gun similar to the guns used in slaughterhouses.

According to Shooter, state game officials assured the public that the rocket nets were a humane way of trapping deer. Then he secretly shot his video, and Shooter and his fellow travelers in the Chicago Animal Rights Coalition released results to TV stations.

"The animals showed every kind of panic and fear you can imagine," said Hindi of his video of a trapped deer. "And the sound. Most people haven't heard the sound of a deer crying out. It's awful."

Shooter said officials immediately put an end to using rocket traps in Illinois.

Shooter's videos, which have appeared on nationally syndicated television shows, also have led to the elimination in Pennsylvania of some turkey and pigeon shoots, he said.

Last Sunday, Shooter had come to Minnetonka to videotape deer caught in net traps favored by the city's hired deer slayers.

The deer issue has been passionate in Minnetonka for a couple of years. So passionate that Mayor Karen Anderson says she's received one death threat for her support of a program to thin the herd.

State officials such as Jay McAninch of the Department of Natural Resources insist the net traps being used in Minnetonka are humane. McAninch, who sounds like a reasonable man, said that once trapped, deer bed down in the net that ensnares them. He said traps are necessary to use in communities such as Minnetonka because the deer herd is being thinned in confined areas, on, or near, residential areas. Shooting deer in such confined areas raises very real public safety issues, he said.

Hindi and other deer savers don't believe the traps are humane. They also believe there are better ways to thin the herd than trapping the deer, then shooting them with a .22-caliber slug. They believe video of a deer being trapped and killed would convince people there are better ways to deal with the deer problem.

Hindi believes that if individuals are forbidden to feed the deer, the population will diminish over time. Some animal rights folks believe birth control darts should be shot into the deer.

But those are side issues; back to the big Monday morning bust.

The deer savers were pulled over. According to Constantine, one police officer, in camouflage gear, ordered the deer savers to lif3t up their boots.

The three complied.

"When we lifted our boots," Constantine said, "the police said, 'Aha, you're under arrest'."

Indeed, the three were arrested, Rudh and Constantine for violating Minnetonka's ordinance that prohibits people from coming within 100 feet of a deer trap. Shooter Hindi was nabbed for aiding and abetting the women.

Hindi's gear was confiscated. Police took Rudh's and Constantine's boots, apparently to prove that prints near a deer trap were made by their boots.

"They won't give them back," Constantine said.

But it doesn't matter.

"We're going to film this, by hook or crook," she vowed.

And with or without boots.