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In the United States, the management of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) has typically focused on improving hunting opportunities and mitigating human-deer conflicts. Yet the expansion and diversification of human communities and activities implies that human-deer interactions may also be diversifying. Approaches based on complex adaptive systems theories have been posited as a way to better attend to the diversity of these interactions between humans and wildlife. Using Indiana as a case, this study draws from the Integrated Adaptive Behavior Model (IABM) to understand human-deer interactions as a complex system. We use empirical social science to understand how citizens across Indiana perceive deer populations, what outcomes they desire, and how these perceptions could be integrated into Indiana's deer management plan. In Indiana, neither wildlife managers nor researchers have assessed public perceptions of deer beyond hunting and farming stakeholders. From May to September 2019, we collected 59 semistructured interviews and two focus groups (n = 14) with deer stakeholders including woodland owners, farmers, deer hunters, and urban area residents. Through mixed inductive-deductive coding, we found that Indiana citizens hold complex emotions toward deer regardless of their stakeholder identity. Factors influencing these emotions include past experiences, current livelihood and behavioral contexts, beliefs about responsibilities and ethics in deer management, and beliefs about other social groups. Our results suggest that the IABM, despite adding in much-needed complexity and realism to the analysis of human-wildlife interactions, still lacks explanatory power over several important dynamics that emerged from our interviews. Here, we discuss how mixed emotions, situational context, and power dynamics challenge conventional management approaches that focus narrowly on mitigating human-deer conflicts, and that reduce public interests to demographic categorizations. To better inform social-ecological governance, models of complex human behavior should account for power within management institutions and across management scales. Our work contributes a refined understanding of how multidimensional emotions and experiences influence public (dis)interest in natural resource management, and what this implies for managers who aim to balance competing social interests with ecological conditions.

Everything seems to need saving. Rarely a day passes without a headline, speech, campaign, or policy to save something precious and at risk, something worthy of protection. Save trees by naming them, Jane Goodall encouraged this year at Davos, an annual gathering of global business and political elites (Pomeroy 2020). The 2020 meeting, typically dominated by talk of economics and high finance, chose "Saving the Planet" as one of its themes. Climate striker Greta Thunberg reminded attendees that "our house is still on fire" and, in speeches delivered around the globe, wonders pointedly why youth should bother "studying for a future that soon will be no more when no one is doing anything whatsoever to save that future" (NPR 2019). Global health initiatives promise to "save lives and money" while some US policymakers lament the "racial savings gap" for black Americans nearing retirement. Saving is having a moment as a key term for our time, so how should we come to terms with it? Saving entered English via the Latin salvare, steadily picking up new meanings and applications over millennia, as an ever-expanding necessity for someone or something "to deliver, rescue…afford salvation,…heal,…preserve,…protect,…salvage" (Oxford English Dictionary 2020). On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, with the words of Dr. King's moving oratory circulating around social media, we were reminded that he found utility in saving, saying it was black Americans who would "save the soul of America." Though these examples show the life-affirming capacities of saving rhetoric, it can also be a preamble to violence. Just weeks after 9/11, President George W. Bush justified the invasion of Afghanistan as no less than "a war to save civilization itself" (CNN 2001). Nearly two decades later, the current US president described the extrajudicial killing of Iranian General Suleimani as a "bold and decisive action to save American lives and deliver American justice."

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