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This is a letter to the editor responding to an earlier article. Growing white-tailed deer populations in Canada's boreal forest are linked to declines of threatened boreal caribou populations. Recent work by Dickie et al. (2024) shows that climate plays a stronger role than anthropogenic habitat alteration in impacting deer white-tailed deer density, however we contend that these findings are not robust due to insufficient data and the analysis used is sensitive to data scaling approach. We demonstrate approximately equal but opposite effects of climate and alteration on white-tailed deer population density, and emphasize the importance of robust analyses involving contentious conservation issues.