The city of Pittsburgh has been trying to reduce the overpopulation of deer in city parks. The city now says bowhunters aren't doing enough, so they're taking a more aggressive approach and deploying sharpshooters.

While animal rights advocates don't like it, city leaders say it's necessary to save the parks.

Are sharpshooters the solution to the overpopulation of deer in the city? Sharpshooters can kill more deer in a single night than bow hunters can in a month's time. 

Having eaten the young tree saplings and the rest of the natural vegetation, deer have fanned out through the neighborhoods, feasting on gardens and resulting in a 400 percent increase in deer-related motor vehicle accidents in just the past few years.

"We don't want to kill innocent animals but we have to make sure they're safe, and their population's not out of control because it's not healthy for them, it's not healthy for the environment and it's not healthy for the community," said Pittsburgh Public Safety Director Lee Schmidt. 

Two years ago, the city began inviting bowhunters into the parks but their culling efforts have fallen short, stabilizing but not reducing the population. Now, the city has upped the ante, introducing United States Department of Agriculture sharpshooters to Frick and Riverside parks.

Through the fall and early winter, bowhunters in the five city parks harvested 199 deer. But in just three nights in Frick and Riverview, two teams of a driver, spotter and a sharpshooter with night vision killed more than 25% of that total: 54 deer, 36 deer in Riverview and 18 in Frick.

The grassroots neighborhood organization Save Our Parks and Gardens, which supported the use of sharpshooters, says these numbers show sharpshooters are the way to effectively reduce the deer population. Still, animal rights advocates disagree.

"We think that there are not only more humane options but more effective options. Particularly non-lethal methods that they could do instead," said Shannon Dickerson with Humane Action Pennsylvania. 

Unlike in other cities, groups like Humane Action Pennsylvania have not staged protests about the deer culling. The group acknowledges the deer population needs to be reduced but believes that can be achieved by options like individually sterilizing the deer. But both the city and the parks group have rejected that as impractical and ineffective.  

"It's so expensive and it doesn't work, because the deer are mobile and you can't figure out who's been sterilized and who hasn't," said Mardi Isler of Save Our Parks and Gardens. 

And the city believes the deer population can be brought down if sharpshooters are deployed in all the city parks beginning next year.

"It depends on who you talk to, but, yeah, some folks say if you do this for three to five years, we can get the population manageable enough," Schmidt said. 

Despite the objections to the sharpshooters, the hope is that the use of them brings the deer down to a manageable level and brings these parks back to their former luster.