Why so many wild animals in suburban New Jersey? (Opinion)

This week we had a deer running wild on the lower level of the George Washington Bridge.

Traffic was shut down as the animal scrambled around trying to avoid capture. It was Saturday night around 8:20, a very busy time trying to get into the city. The deer was on the Jersey-bound direction. Of course, that's where all his relatives live.

Then we had a bear sighting in Atlantic Highlands, which is very rare.

The bruin was also spotted in King Phil's neighborhood on the tony side of Middletown and along the Navesink this week. Maybe he heard the governor stopped the bear hunt and likes to give away free stuff. That seems like a very unlikely and unsafe place for a bear to be roaming around.

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Down in South Jersey, a woman spotted a coyote in her very populated development of Holiday on the Green near Ramblewood CC in Mount Laurel.

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Coyotes can look like dogs but have a distinctive gait. Surprisingly, they can be found in 96% of the state's land area. So of course they can be dangerous to humans and their pets. They migrated here from out west in the 1800s and the first one was spotted here in 1930. They can be hunted but are very elusive. It's one of the few animals you can hunt at night with a shotgun and in daylight with an AR-15.

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So why so many wild animals in suburban New Jersey? Men and societal pressure.

Young men don't hunt as much anymore and hunters are looked down upon as ignorant, backwoods scoundrels. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most hunters are very careful about their hunting and very conservation-minded about nature and its bounty. You wouldn't know that unless you knew one or were a hunter yourself.

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New Jersey is losing its hunting culture, so lock your garbage cans, keep your pets inside at night and call your insurance company to see what your deductible in for a deer collision.

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Dennis Malloy only.

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