Oh deer! Maybe this isn't such a good idea.....

Only once has a Higher Power (read: publisher) spiked one of my editorials. But the experience was more hilarious than infuriating.

I was editorial page editor at a one-person shop whose management was much more conservative than I was at the time. That didn't bother me; there were plenty of local issues to write about that had no ideology at all, so I was happy to concentrate on those and steered clear of the fuzzier philosophical issues.

After two years on the job I was pretty sure I knew the boundaries. I met the editor every morning to discuss topics for the editorial page so he, and through him, the publisher, understood what I was working on.

One day, a controversy erupted concerning a nearby nature preserve that had become overcrowded with deer. The deer were stripping all the foliage, and despite that were so high in numbers that some were starving. The state wanted to institute a controlled hunt to reduce the number of deer.

The animal rights activists immediately objected, saying that feeding the deer a form of birth control or transporting the deer elsewhere would be more humane than reducing their numbers.

I weighed both sides and concluded that the best choice was, indeed, to institute a hunt. Wildlife biologists told me that transporting the deer would send so many into shock that they would die anyway; leaving birth control medication outside for deer to eat was an uncertain solution and would have dubious effectiveness.

So, with the editor's blessing, I wrote an editorial instructing the state to kill Bambi.

We were an afternoon paper. In the morning, about two hours before we went to press, the editor hurriedly called me into his office. Could I pull the editorial and substitute another?

I was surprised, because he had never asked me that before.

Sure, I replied, but why? Did he have a problem with the editorial?

No, he said, HE didn't have a problem with it.

Well, did the publisher have a problem with the editorial?

No, said my boss, the publisher didn't give a damn one way or the other. The problem was that the publisher's MOTHER loved the deer and completely agreed with the animal rights people. To make matters worse, the publisher's wife agreed with his mother. The publisher figured that if the editorial was published, he'd get it from both barrels when he went home that night. The issue wasn't worth the grief.

So, laughing like a hyena, I pulled the editorial. We were mum on the issue. The hunt went forward without us. And I was never asked to pull another editorial again.

The moral of the story:

Every Higher Power has a Higher Power.

NCEW board member Maura Casey is associate editorial page editor of The Day in New London, Conn. Her e-mail address is [e-mail]