Times certainly have changed over the past half-century.

Last week the Pittsburgh suburb of Mount Lebanon awarded a $75,000 contract for trapping and euthanizing whitetail deer, pending approval by state game officials.

Deer have become a nuisance in the densely populated community of more than 33,000, where there are no natural predators. An aerial survey conducted with infrared cameras in 2013 counted nearly 350 deer. The deer were evenly scattered in parks and backyards throughout the municipality — a scattering that confounds strategies to cull the herd.

In December 2014 alone, Mount Lebanon residents and public safety officials reported 31 incidents involving deer — struck by vehicles, injured, sick or dead — that’s an average of one incident per day.

Just east of Mount Lebanon is another Pittsburgh suburb, Clairton, which was the setting for the Academy Award-winning movie “The Deer Hunter.” The disturbing depiction of Vietnam War violence begins with three steelworkers leaving a wedding reception in Clairton to go whitetail hunting somewhere in the Allegheny Forest.

The stunning point is that there were no populating Pittsburgh’s suburbs during the late 1960s and early ’70s. Over the past 50 years the city has transformed itself from a gritty, soot-choked steel town into something more environmentally responsible, healthy and aesthetic.

The deer that once fled the city have returned in droves. Absent predators, they have proliferated. They get hit by cars. They eat expensive landscape gardens. They have become a nuisance.

Mount Lebanon officials were forced to act. They did so methodically, considering their options and consequences.

For more than two years, Wildlife Management Associates, run by biologist J. Merlin Benner, has been advising Mount Lebanon officials about its deer management problem. Benner’s firm was the sole bidder to respond to the municipality’s call for proposals.

He proposed using bait to trap the whitetails in corrals, then using modified firearms to euthanize them. The corrals would be set up in the municipality’s three parks and public golf course. Benner would be paid $500 per deer killed.

Benner said a local meatpacking firm has offered to process the deer carcasses at no charge. The meat will be donated to local charities, he said. Good move — it would be a shame for the venison to go to waste.

Still, it makes you wonder what’s become of game management in Pennsylvania’s urban environments, or whether a trio of steel hunkies from the Vietnam War era would even recognize their hometown today.