This spring, as we have so many other years before, we ran information to counter the Bambi Effect. Well-meaning people find a fawn — wide-eyed and fragile, just as cute as Bambi — and want to help it.

They think it is deserted. Really, most fawns don’t need human help. Their mothers are out foraging and will return.

One group of dedicated volunteers — 1,400 strong in New York State — knows better: licensed wildlife rehabilitators.

They work at the intersection of civilization and wildlife. When our country was founded, wildlife used to be just that — wild.

As civilization has encroached on wildlife habitat, much wildlife is protected or regulated by law. The United States Constitution is silent on the matter so states are the sovereign governments when it comes to wildlife law.

In New York State, the Department of Environmental Conservation regulates the rehabilitators who, for example, nurse back to health a deer hit by a car or hurt by some other form of human activity, and the DEC also regulates the hunters who kill deer.

The DEC calls hunting “harvesting,” which indicates the posture of the department: Deer are seen as being rather like a crop that must be managed for the good of the deer population — too many, for example, would lead to starvation — and for the good of people who enjoy the sport of hunting as well as for the good of people who don’t want their lawns and gardens ravaged.

The rehabilitators see the deer — and other hurt wild animals — as individuals in need of rescue. They often speak of them as having rights and needing protection.

This discrepancy is at the root of a controversy over new DEC regulations put into effect at the start of this year, inspiring two lawsuits from rehabilitators.

The DEC says the purpose of wildlife rehabilitation is to treat injured animals so they can be returned to the wild, not to keep them for extended stays or to treat them as pets.

We agree with this philosophy. Wild animals belong in the wild, or what’s left of it. Generally, that is better for the animal and for humans. The American Veterinary Medical Association supports regulation of wild-animal ownership and, according to its policies, “expects international, federal, state, and local authorities and policymakers to provide adequate funding and other resources to ensure effective enforcement of regulations pertaining to ownership, possession, and disposition of wild animal species….”

The AVMA points out threats posed by keeping wild animals “which may serve as a reservoir and/or vector for transmission of infectious agents or which may otherwise cause direct or indirect harm to humans, other animals, the environment, or wild populations of the same species.”

We believe most rehabilitators would agree with this, too.

So what is causing the controversy?

To start with, the rehabilitators weren’t consulted about the changes. Such consultation would have avoided the affront they felt and may have also created regulations that would allow the rehabbers to better succeed.

Kelly Martin of Berne, president of the New York State Wildlife Rehabilitation Council, is one of the two women who filed suit. She has been caring for injured wild animals for three decades.

Giving one example of problems with the new regulations, Martin told our reporter Elizabeth Floyd Mair that the standard practice with fawns had been to keep them over the winter and release them the following spring.

To prevent fawns from becoming habituated, Martin said, surrogate adult deer were used to show them how to be deer. Under the new rules, however, rehabbers can keep an injured adult deer for no more than 48 hours. After that, it must be released or euthanized

Further, fawns now have to be released to the wild by Sept. 15. That’s just before hunting season begins, causing the DEC to add another regulation: Any deer that has been medicated must be tagged so an unwitting hunter doesn’t consume tainted venison.

We understand that, if the DEC sees deer as a crop to be harvested, it makes sense not to prolong the out-of-the-wild period. But we also see that, if the rehabber sees the deer as an individual to be nursed back to health, more time should be granted so long as the rehabilitator is sure not to cross the line into making the deer a pet.

With injured deer or orphaned fawns being released prematurely, the Bambi Effect is likely to take even a stronger hold. Citizens may well take these needy animals into their homes, which could be dangerous for their household as well as the animals.

It would also strain enforcement resources. It’s easy for the DEC to keep track of rehabilitators that it licenses. It would be tough if not impossible to ferret out the untrained citizens who might feel compelled to try to rescue a hurt or orphaned deer.

Then, too, a few of the deer that have been in captivity, for a long-term convalescence or that were not able to fully recover, are useful to educate the public. Such education is sorely needed.

Even if the mindset at the DEC is to think of deer as a crop, we urge those who set policy, as new regulations are set to be issued next month, to work with the rehabilitators to come up with rules they can abide by. If a volunteer wants to commit to months of nursing a sick wild animal back to health, what harm does that do the DEC or the public?

The deer may inevitably be shot but, in the meantime, the public is safer.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer