A Killarney Municipal District meeting has heard that a deer struck by a vehicle, lay dying on the side of a main road for hours despite efforts to contact the authorities.
Labour councillor Marie Moloney has said there should be an on-call vet or an out-of-hours phone number that people can call when an animal is injured in such a manner.
Cllr Moloney said she was contacted by a man coming home from Cork Airport, who narrowly avoided hitting deer on two separate occasions on the same journey.
For a third time on that same journey, at Rathanane, a deer ran out in front of him; he swerved but did not manage to avoid the deer and struck it.
Cllr Moloney said the deer was dying on the side of the road, and the man drove home where he called An Garda Síochána, and attempted to contact the National Parks and Wildlife Service, but it was out of hours for their phoneline.
He came back a few hours later to check and the deer was still there, barely alive but dying and suffering, and the man was afraid children would see it the next morning.
Cllr Moloney said there has to be some out-of-hours contact or on-call vet, with a phone number people can call in this scenario.
She said there must be a more humane way to deal with this, especially with the deer population growing.
Meanwhile, Kerry County Council confirmed in response to a separate motion from Kerry Independent Alliance councillor John O’Donoghue, that two deer pilot schemes are being undertaken in the Killarney area.
Cllr O’Donoghue said nobody is taking responsibility for the deer, in the way a farmer would be responsible for livestock, and the situation is reaching crisis point for motorists.
One scheme is a detection and alert system, which is to be rolled out in the coming weeks subject to GDPR approval.
The second is a deterrence system using noise to discourage the deer from crossing roads when vehicles are present on the R569 and at Ballydowney.
The results and effectiveness of the pilot schemes will then be assessed by University College Cork.
