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https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... MZg69JN6tc

Wild deer set to wreak havoc in UK woodlands as venison demand plunges

Unmanaged animals from Britain’s largest herds for 1,000 years are no longer needed with restaurants in lockdown

Bring back wolves.

emordnilap wrote: ↑11 Jan 2021, 10:30 Bring back wolves.

I was thinking more of an advertising campaign promoting venison as an alternative to beef or lamb but I'm sure your idea has equal merit.

Free condoms?

Potemkin Villager wrote: ↑11 Jan 2021, 13:11 Free condoms?

In the light of the lockdown situation, free broadband for all is a better idea.

I live in a small town surrounded more or less by countryside. We have for a few years now had a "local" deer herd that lives nearby and is commonly seen coming into the town . There are often pictures on social media of them grazing outside the local morrisons supermarket or on other grassed areas. They are almost tame , walking a short time ago i found myself only yards from them . They weren't spooked , scared or threatening , they just watched as i walked by. The herd had young so seems to have settled in. As to them "wreaking havoc" so far it has been pretty limited so far. A few people , including one i work for , have had them in their gardens where they may put a footprint or two in soft ground and trample a few flowers . The worst they do is to chew conifers. In all honesty i'm actually surprised , considering how close one can get to them , that they haven't been taken by poachers.

If you had a vegetable garden, L2, you would see the havoc that they can wreak. I live in the country with woods and 1000 acres of common land next door but I regularly, almost daily, get visited by a family of roe deer and muntjacs and have my vegetables trimmed in preference to the vast amounts of deer food elsewhere. They also like the leaves from our fruit trees and any saplings which we plant have to be heavily protected. Many of our forests will die off in the next hundred years because deer have grazed the understorey out of existance so that there are no replacement trees growing to replace the dying ones.

The fact that deer are almost fearless of humans shows just how bad things have got for us and how good they are for deer. They have no predators left and consequently their population will explode. The chances of any land being truly rewilded to grow trees to capture carbon will amount to zero as the deer will keep those new trees down.

It cant be that hard to shoot most of the deer in places were numbers are excessive. Sell the meat cheaply to local people. Shooting some of them might make the survivors a bit more wary of people.

Deer are a part of the natural world in modest numbers, but are indeed very destructive when overly numerous.

careful_eugene wrote: ↑11 Jan 2021, 10:58

emordnilap wrote: ↑11 Jan 2021, 10:30 Bring back wolves.

I was thinking more of an advertising campaign promoting venison as an alternative to beef or lamb but I'm sure your idea has equal merit.

The main reason that venison is still a niche market is because the supply chain of venison is a small scale very spread out affair which doesn't fit with the supermarkets requirement for a large scale, centralised and very cheap supply chain. It therefore isn't in stock in most supermarkets and supermarkets have run the small butchers, who once would have stocked venison, out of business.

The people supplying venison are game keepers, farmers, vermin controllers and a few individual shooters/hunters who go out maybe a few nights a week and supply local game dealers, of which there are still a few. A few farmers tried farming red deer for the supermarket trade but I'm not sure if there are that many left. Supermarkets like to take most of the profit on any trade so you have to have the benefits of massive scale to work with them.

kenneal - lagger wrote: ↑12 Jan 2021, 16:04 If you had a vegetable garden, L2, you would see the havoc that they can wreak.

I do have a vegetable garden and fruit trees and there are fields beyond that. I haven't suffered any deer damage however but thats probably because the borders are secure , made so to keep out a spate of two legged vermin some time ago. There's edibles in the front garden too . These seem safe but then i've never seen the deer down our road. I'm aware of the damage they can do , just saying that i haven't heard any real complaints about "our" herd .

Getting a firearm certificate now involves jumping through even more hoops, so the number of people able to shoot deer will probably fall. I'm unaware of any crimes being committed with deer rifles, but that doesn't seem to matter.

adam2 wrote: ↑12 Jan 2021, 16:11 It cant be that hard to shoot most of the deer in places were numbers are excessive. Sell the meat cheaply to local people. Shooting some of them might make the survivors a bit more wary of people.

Deer are a part of the natural world in modest numbers, but are indeed very destructive when overly numerous.

Not difficult at all, a couple of days training is all you need if you are already able to shoot reasonably. The rifles used are quite powerful, some common sense required.

There has got to be a business opportunity here. Obviously the deer are free to take, I'm less sure on the processing, distribution and disposal.

A business opportunity either legal or otherwise assuming one could find a market. Again i'm only commenting on the small herd , perhaps a dozen , that stroll into our town here . There's frequent pictures on social media of them, the local facebook page has them as a cover photo , pictures of them grazing outside the supermarket , petrol station or whatever. Most of the comments are of the "arh , aren't they lovely" and "we're building on their land" type of thing with only the odd one where anyone has said anything about damage . A guy i work for has had some damage and we have tied branches around some fruit trees to try to prevent further damage. . Rounding the deer up and shooting them would i think cause some sort of uproar. That's somewhat ironic in many respects as we are only a few miles from Cannock Chase which has a much higher deer population which gets culled and hunted with very few complaints. I've eaten it myself and very nice it was too although a tad more expensive.
I can't help thinking the term "wrecking havoc" is a bit over the top. A small problem yes but not one that is insurmountable by any stretch of the imagination.

adam2 wrote: ↑12 Jan 2021, 16:11
Deer are a part of the natural world in modest numbers, but are indeed very destructive when overly numerous.

Of course another species comes to mind that is many orders of magnitude more destructive.
These overly numerous & unmanaged animals are truly wreaking havoc, not just on the UK, but on the entire planet.