14 ms·

What the Deer Are Telling Us

79 points by Ygg2 12y ago

vdnkh 12y ago
Interesting article. My first job was working in a park in Monmouth County, NJ. Of the two parks I worked at, one was completely fenced off from deer while the other had small sections fenced off to study the impact of deer on forest regeneration [0]. The caged park had a number of rare plants and if deer got in (which happened pretty frequently), we would drop everything and corral them out of the park. The second park was much too large to cage, but the park system allowed hunters to hunt during certain times of the year. [0]http://co.monmouth.nj.us/documents/127/deer_annual_report_2013_2014.pdf http://co.monmouth.nj.us/documents/127/deer_annual_report_20...
sogen 12y ago
Wow, didn't know that there's a deer ultraoverpopulation. Very interesting reading, thanks a lot!
- eitally 12y ago
  If you live in the eastern US (I guess anywhere but within major metro centers) it becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly, but likely more for long time residents than others. My brother in law is a veterinarian and he got a "deer population control" hunting license last year that allowed him to take up to 40 deer. Our collective freezers are chock full of venison. Luckily, someone had a brilliant idea to create a meat donation charity (Hunters for the Hungry), which has distributed millions of pounds of venison to the needy over the past couple decades. Here's an information clearinghouse for anyone interested: http://huntingprograms.nra.org/hunters-for-the-hungry-information-clearinghouse.aspx http://huntingprograms.nra.org/hunters-for-the-hungry-inform...)
  - whoisthemachine 12y ago
    That's awesome.
  - jmccree 12y ago
    There's a pretty interesting article about the efforts in GA to manage the deer population: https://www.gon.com/article.php?id=2518 https://www.gon.com/article.php?id=2518 . Hunting is still pretty popular in the southeast, so there's a constant balance between destroying the deer population and the deer population destroying the environment.
    - ghaff 12y ago
      I know of tech companies in the southeast that have team events in which they'll go out hunting for the day. I imagine that's less common in Silicon Valley :-)
  - sogen 12y ago
    Wow, that's a great idea, thanks a lot for sharing (and I never thought I'd click a NRA link, specially on HN)
  - jimmaswell 12y ago
    I live in the eastern US away from any major metro center and I see some deer around, sometimes a lot and sometimes not, but it's really not "obvious" that they're overpopulated. I wouldn't have any way to draw that conclusion without hearing it from someone in the field who actually knows what constitutes overpopulation for that kind of species. There are also tons of squirrels everywhere but nobody draws the conclusion that they're overpopulated.
  - Kluny 12y ago
    That's awesome. My first thought on reading about conservation officers "harvesting" deer was wondering where all that meat is going, and had a horrible feeling that they were just leaving it to rot somewhere. I'm very glad to hear that some hungry people are seeing benefit from it. In fact, it would be great if some part of our nation's beef-heavy diet could be replaced with venison - I'd definitely choose that route, as long as eating deer meat instead of cow meat had a positive environmental impact. Cow farts are destroying the earth.
  - omegaham 12y ago
    I knew someone growing up who simply could not eat venison for this reason. For him, it was a reminder of poverty; it was the only meat that his dad could get, and they ate it every day because they could barely afford mac and cheese. I found this really interesting, as I always thought of venison as one of those foods you pretty much only got at a really high-end restaurant or from a (rare) friend who hunted. Different culture.
- Ygg2 12y ago
  It also demonstrates a nice parallel, in which deer/humans population thrives, despite the loss of biodiversity, until they inevitably hit a brick wall and suddenly die off.
- david-given 12y ago
  Well, I'm Scottish. Most people don't realise that the Scottish wilderness is basically industrial wasteland: originally mostly forested, it's been clearfelled, then intensively farmed, then the farmers were ethnically cleansed and it was converted fairly crudely to grazing, and then when that was no longer viable it's largely been abandoned. Needless to say, all the predators (bear, wolves and lynx, mostly) are dead, while the useful food animals (red deer, roe deer) run wild. The end result is devastation. It looks beautiful, but ecologically it's awful: there's a huge deer overpopulation, and they eat everything. Trees won't regenerate because saplings don't survive. Without trees the entire bottom of the ecosystem is missing, and without treeroots holding the tiny amount of soil together, it turns into mush. If you spend a night out in the Scottish wilderness, even in the middle of summer it's _dead silent_. If there's water nearby you might hear a curlew. Occasional skylarks. You'll also probably hear the weird grunting of a herd of red deer across the glen. Contrast with Norway, where every flat surface is covered with dwarf birch and dwarf spruce, and there's birdsong everywhere... (You do get Forestry Commission forests of Norwegian spruce. These are even worse; the trees are grown commercially, they're extremely fast growing, usually planted way too close together, they're clear cut every decade or so, and they're utterly barren. Not even the deer will go in.) Every now and again you'll find a small area that's well fenced off enough to keep the deer out, and it'll be full of trees. But a massive, nationwide cull of deer is politically impossible (I know one estate owner who's received hate mail for culling the deer on his estate, as required by law). There are some attempts to reintroduce wolves, but people are understandably a bit leery. Lynx may be viable: apparently they're not big enough to pose much of a threat to the deer, but will at least keep them moving, which will help solve some of the overgrazing problem. There's also a lot more awareness these days, with more fencing and planting, but it's all piecemeal, and it usually doesn't happen on the high moors and hillsides which are the most at risk. So, um, yeah. Deer are a goddamned menace.
  - nacho_weekend 12y ago
    Wow, had no idea about the history of the scottish dilemma but it makes sense. Thanks!
    - 12y ago
ChuckMcM 12y ago
This has been a boon to the mountain lion population in California :-) Although I was a bit dismayed when the news covered the attack of a deer by a mountain lion[1] as though it was a "bad" thing. I've pointed out before that if you don't let people hunt these animals other predators will fill the gap. wolves, coyotes, lions, and the occasional bear have all been active in California. [1] http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/San-Mateo-Residents-Witness-Mountain-Lion-Attack-Deer-265467731.html http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/San-Mateo-Residents-Wit...
- pyre 12y ago
  The problem is when those predators have been completely removed. It requires manual intervention to bring them back. Can you imagine the protests to bringing back predators to an area? "Think of the Children!"
  - logfromblammo 12y ago
    My hypothesis is that humans can fill any predator niche, all the way down to insectivores. When the natural predators are completely removed, humans are certainly capable of filling the gap. We have, after all, billionhandedly hunted some species to extinction. If the rifles are too dangerous for the area, live capture traps and knives would work just as well. The only reason people use long arms instead of more efficient traps to kill game animals is because operating a trap line is boring in comparison. It's the same reason why people catch fish using a rod and reel rather than a giant net or a fish wheel. It's just more fun. The real question here is "why are these people surrounded by food and not eating any of it?"
    - pyre 12y ago
      > It's the same reason why people catch fish using a rod and reel rather than a giant net or a fish wheel. It's just more fun. Well, you also have the consider the affect of every person that goes fishing on a small waterway using a giant net and catching many times the number of fish... That seems like a good way to destroy the local fish populations in addition to destroying the underwater environment by dragging nets through it constantly.
Spooky23 12y ago
I grew up in rural upstate NY and can attest to this. Once subdivisions reach further out into the countryside, the denziens of these developments (another disease afflicting the land, IMO) apply their city-thinking to the environment around them. In my town, farmers were harassed out of business by McMansion owners who built houses abutting farms, but were offended by the odor that come with pigs and cattle. Hunters parking on the side of county roads were pushed out by do-gooders complaining about the parking situation (in an area where 5 acres is the minimum building lot!) resulting in a rash of "parking on pavement" tickets. Then came the banishment of rifles for deer hunting, because "think of the children". The end result... the culture changed. The first day of deer season used to be literally a school holiday. Now, it's a fringe thing, and my parents routinely see herds of 100+ deer at night -- when you drive up their road at night, it's spooky... you see dozens of eyes reflecting in the headlights! When I was a kid in the early 90s, I never saw more than a dozen at a time.
- kbenson 12y ago
  Forcing farmers out because new residents weren't smart enough in scouting their new home location is stupid. That said, I'm not sure I can muster any indignation that hunters can't hunt as much, or that the first day of hunting season is not "literally a school holiday" anymore.
  - chrisbennet 12y ago
    I used to belong to a local Fish and Game club that had skeet shooting fields. (Skeet are fun to shoot but the meat is very tough.) The club was forced to close the shooting ranges due to neighbors that moved into the area around the club because they didn't like the noise. The club had been shooting there for 80 years before that...
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - avn2109 12y ago
      Very, very tough.
datashovel 12y ago
This is the part that stood out to me, though not entirely unexpected. Earth, as biologist E.O. Wilson has noted, is in the midst of a sixth mass extinction. (There are five others in the geologic record, stretching back 500 million years.) “Extinction is now proceeding thousands of times faster than the production of new species,”...
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  This part stuck out for me. "Again and again, time has proven the Malthusian pessimists wrong."
  - datashovel 12y ago
    I get the impression you read that passage as a "feeling" or a "belief". I read it as the person quoted was citing scientific fact that, regardless whether the outcome for humans is negative or positive, is an observable phenomenon in the physical world. I have no stake personally in whether it will turn out good or bad for humans, though of course I wish no ill upon future generations. However, the fact is I will be long gone before anyone will know what the impact will be.
    - happyscrappy 12y ago
      How in the world would you get the impression that it was a feeling? You are projecting your and the medias doom mantra. Malthusian pessimists were wrong, sorry.
      - datashovel 12y ago
        "doom" and "pessimism" are human constructs. In the objective physical world things "are" or "are not". The quote says that objectively verifiable facts indicate the earth is experiencing a mass extinction. There is no such thing as "doom" or "pessimism" besides that in which humans perceive it.
        12y ago
brlewis 12y ago
Deer need predators. Humans need higher income and education: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence
zzalpha 12y ago
Sounds like we need to do our job as apex predators. 'course, that won't make some animal rights folks happy, but until the natural predator population rebounds (which it may never do), it's our responsibility to at least clean up our own mess and do the job for them.
- protonfish 12y ago
  It's the wolves that are the apex predators, not us. Natural hunters prey and the very young and old, the sick and weak. Human trophy hunters target almost exclusively mature males. Not only does this do nothing to thin the herd of its weakest members, it does little to make a significant reduction of population. There is no reason to think that if half of the male population were culled, any fewer does would be pregnant the following year.
  - nonameface 12y ago
    Not all hunters are trophy hunters, that is just a subset of hunters. Numbers from my state show close to a 50/50 split between antlered/anterless (Note: Anterless may contain some bucks, but the hunter thought they were shooting a doe) http://wvmetronews.com/2015/01/16/final-numbers-on-2014-deer-seasons/ http://wvmetronews.com/2015/01/16/final-numbers-on-2014-deer... The breakdown on each season: Firearm Buck season 37,766 bucks, antlerless firearms hunting, 39,514 antlerless deer, archery season, 21,653 deer and 5,290 deer during muzzleloader season.
    - ky3 12y ago
      But are the anterless hunters doing it because they want to? Or because they are forced to by law? Meaning, all hunters are actually trophy hunters, just that for every trophy they bag, they must haul out -- at their own expense -- non-trophies.
blakeja 12y ago
Pretty good documentary "The Private Life of Deer" that speaks towards deer overpopulation a bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9t0sYnIGBo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9t0sYnIGBo Should be on Netflix as well.
gbog 12y ago
Why don't they eat them? Deer meat is excellent, much better than this industrial red and humid plastic sold as beef in the U.S. In France I heard boars are too many, and destroy the crops. Let's make a new trend in haute cuisine: boar meat as the new flavor. It can't be worse than molecular cuisine. Also, it's is much better from animal rights point of view: boar life is better than those of industrial pork generating machines (aka pigs).
- epsylon 12y ago
  Boar is also delicious when cooked well !
- ky3 12y ago
  Why don't they eat them? The USA has a tradition of being a land of plenty and so people eat what they have always eaten before. For almost all of America that means chicken or beef, invariably. And turkey during that time of the year. They have no tradition of organ meat, meaning liver, tripe, hoofs, etc. The conservatism in tastes mean a lot of work cut out for anyone trying to sell new food in what is still a highly industrialized landscape and high barriers-to-entry sales channels. E.g. if you're poor you eat deer until you grow up traumatized by it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9351269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9351269
cmurf 12y ago
Meanwhile in Colorado, just a couple years ago, officials were freaking out about the mule deer population dropping. And they're all, we have to bring back our deer! I wonder if a combination of drought and previous overgrazing is the source of that drop.
cmurf 12y ago
If we were smarter, we'd go back to more native grasses and eating the animals that eat those grasses if we can't eat those grasses ourselves. What we do instead is the exact opposite. We destroy the native grasses, bring in non-native plants to grow non-native animals and then eat those animals. Sometimes I think I'm an alien, and scoff at how proud humans are of their ignorance and hubris. But hey, good luck with that.
cmurf 12y ago
"Ecosystem damage becomes apparent at roughly 15 deer per square mile..." And yet http://dnr.wi.gov/topic/hunt/documents/abungoals.pdf http://dnr.wi.gov/topic/hunt/documents/abungoals.pdf The numbers in red are well higher than 15. So if that's right, it seems like Wisconsin (for example) would need to reduce its deer population by at least 50%. That's quite the culling.

79 points by Ygg2 12y ago

vdnkh 12y ago

Interesting article. My first job was working in a park in Monmouth County, NJ. Of the two parks I worked at, one was completely fenced off from deer while the other had small sections fenced off to study the impact of deer on forest regeneration [0]. The caged park had a number of rare plants and if deer got in (which happened pretty frequently), we would drop everything and corral them out of the park. The second park was much too large to cage, but the park system allowed hunters to hunt during certain times of the year. [0]http://co.monmouth.nj.us/documents/127/deer_annual_report_2013_2014.pdf http://co.monmouth.nj.us/documents/127/deer_annual_report_20...

sogen 12y ago

Wow, didn't know that there's a deer ultraoverpopulation. Very interesting reading, thanks a lot!

eitally 12y ago
If you live in the eastern US (I guess anywhere but within major metro centers) it becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly, but likely more for long time residents than others. My brother in law is a veterinarian and he got a "deer population control" hunting license last year that allowed him to take up to 40 deer. Our collective freezers are chock full of venison. Luckily, someone had a brilliant idea to create a meat donation charity (Hunters for the Hungry), which has distributed millions of pounds of venison to the needy over the past couple decades. Here's an information clearinghouse for anyone interested: http://huntingprograms.nra.org/hunters-for-the-hungry-information-clearinghouse.aspx http://huntingprograms.nra.org/hunters-for-the-hungry-inform...)
- whoisthemachine 12y ago
  That's awesome.
- jmccree 12y ago
  There's a pretty interesting article about the efforts in GA to manage the deer population: https://www.gon.com/article.php?id=2518 https://www.gon.com/article.php?id=2518 . Hunting is still pretty popular in the southeast, so there's a constant balance between destroying the deer population and the deer population destroying the environment.
  - ghaff 12y ago
    I know of tech companies in the southeast that have team events in which they'll go out hunting for the day. I imagine that's less common in Silicon Valley :-)
- sogen 12y ago
  Wow, that's a great idea, thanks a lot for sharing (and I never thought I'd click a NRA link, specially on HN)
- jimmaswell 12y ago
  I live in the eastern US away from any major metro center and I see some deer around, sometimes a lot and sometimes not, but it's really not "obvious" that they're overpopulated. I wouldn't have any way to draw that conclusion without hearing it from someone in the field who actually knows what constitutes overpopulation for that kind of species. There are also tons of squirrels everywhere but nobody draws the conclusion that they're overpopulated.
- Kluny 12y ago
  That's awesome. My first thought on reading about conservation officers "harvesting" deer was wondering where all that meat is going, and had a horrible feeling that they were just leaving it to rot somewhere. I'm very glad to hear that some hungry people are seeing benefit from it. In fact, it would be great if some part of our nation's beef-heavy diet could be replaced with venison - I'd definitely choose that route, as long as eating deer meat instead of cow meat had a positive environmental impact. Cow farts are destroying the earth.
- omegaham 12y ago
  I knew someone growing up who simply could not eat venison for this reason. For him, it was a reminder of poverty; it was the only meat that his dad could get, and they ate it every day because they could barely afford mac and cheese. I found this really interesting, as I always thought of venison as one of those foods you pretty much only got at a really high-end restaurant or from a (rare) friend who hunted. Different culture.
Ygg2 12y ago
It also demonstrates a nice parallel, in which deer/humans population thrives, despite the loss of biodiversity, until they inevitably hit a brick wall and suddenly die off.
david-given 12y ago
Well, I'm Scottish. Most people don't realise that the Scottish wilderness is basically industrial wasteland: originally mostly forested, it's been clearfelled, then intensively farmed, then the farmers were ethnically cleansed and it was converted fairly crudely to grazing, and then when that was no longer viable it's largely been abandoned. Needless to say, all the predators (bear, wolves and lynx, mostly) are dead, while the useful food animals (red deer, roe deer) run wild. The end result is devastation. It looks beautiful, but ecologically it's awful: there's a huge deer overpopulation, and they eat everything. Trees won't regenerate because saplings don't survive. Without trees the entire bottom of the ecosystem is missing, and without treeroots holding the tiny amount of soil together, it turns into mush. If you spend a night out in the Scottish wilderness, even in the middle of summer it's _dead silent_. If there's water nearby you might hear a curlew. Occasional skylarks. You'll also probably hear the weird grunting of a herd of red deer across the glen. Contrast with Norway, where every flat surface is covered with dwarf birch and dwarf spruce, and there's birdsong everywhere... (You do get Forestry Commission forests of Norwegian spruce. These are even worse; the trees are grown commercially, they're extremely fast growing, usually planted way too close together, they're clear cut every decade or so, and they're utterly barren. Not even the deer will go in.) Every now and again you'll find a small area that's well fenced off enough to keep the deer out, and it'll be full of trees. But a massive, nationwide cull of deer is politically impossible (I know one estate owner who's received hate mail for culling the deer on his estate, as required by law). There are some attempts to reintroduce wolves, but people are understandably a bit leery. Lynx may be viable: apparently they're not big enough to pose much of a threat to the deer, but will at least keep them moving, which will help solve some of the overgrazing problem. There's also a lot more awareness these days, with more fencing and planting, but it's all piecemeal, and it usually doesn't happen on the high moors and hillsides which are the most at risk. So, um, yeah. Deer are a goddamned menace.
- nacho_weekend 12y ago
  Wow, had no idea about the history of the scottish dilemma but it makes sense. Thanks!
  - 12y ago

ChuckMcM 12y ago

This has been a boon to the mountain lion population in California :-) Although I was a bit dismayed when the news covered the attack of a deer by a mountain lion[1] as though it was a "bad" thing. I've pointed out before that if you don't let people hunt these animals other predators will fill the gap. wolves, coyotes, lions, and the occasional bear have all been active in California. [1] http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/San-Mateo-Residents-Witness-Mountain-Lion-Attack-Deer-265467731.html http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/San-Mateo-Residents-Wit...

pyre 12y ago
The problem is when those predators have been completely removed. It requires manual intervention to bring them back. Can you imagine the protests to bringing back predators to an area? "Think of the Children!"
- logfromblammo 12y ago
  My hypothesis is that humans can fill any predator niche, all the way down to insectivores. When the natural predators are completely removed, humans are certainly capable of filling the gap. We have, after all, billionhandedly hunted some species to extinction. If the rifles are too dangerous for the area, live capture traps and knives would work just as well. The only reason people use long arms instead of more efficient traps to kill game animals is because operating a trap line is boring in comparison. It's the same reason why people catch fish using a rod and reel rather than a giant net or a fish wheel. It's just more fun. The real question here is "why are these people surrounded by food and not eating any of it?"
  - pyre 12y ago
    > It's the same reason why people catch fish using a rod and reel rather than a giant net or a fish wheel. It's just more fun. Well, you also have the consider the affect of every person that goes fishing on a small waterway using a giant net and catching many times the number of fish... That seems like a good way to destroy the local fish populations in addition to destroying the underwater environment by dragging nets through it constantly.

Spooky23 12y ago

I grew up in rural upstate NY and can attest to this. Once subdivisions reach further out into the countryside, the denziens of these developments (another disease afflicting the land, IMO) apply their city-thinking to the environment around them. In my town, farmers were harassed out of business by McMansion owners who built houses abutting farms, but were offended by the odor that come with pigs and cattle. Hunters parking on the side of county roads were pushed out by do-gooders complaining about the parking situation (in an area where 5 acres is the minimum building lot!) resulting in a rash of "parking on pavement" tickets. Then came the banishment of rifles for deer hunting, because "think of the children". The end result... the culture changed. The first day of deer season used to be literally a school holiday. Now, it's a fringe thing, and my parents routinely see herds of 100+ deer at night -- when you drive up their road at night, it's spooky... you see dozens of eyes reflecting in the headlights! When I was a kid in the early 90s, I never saw more than a dozen at a time.

kbenson 12y ago
Forcing farmers out because new residents weren't smart enough in scouting their new home location is stupid. That said, I'm not sure I can muster any indignation that hunters can't hunt as much, or that the first day of hunting season is not "literally a school holiday" anymore.
- chrisbennet 12y ago
  I used to belong to a local Fish and Game club that had skeet shooting fields. (Skeet are fun to shoot but the meat is very tough.) The club was forced to close the shooting ranges due to neighbors that moved into the area around the club because they didn't like the noise. The club had been shooting there for 80 years before that...
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - avn2109 12y ago
    Very, very tough.

datashovel 12y ago

This is the part that stood out to me, though not entirely unexpected. Earth, as biologist E.O. Wilson has noted, is in the midst of a sixth mass extinction. (There are five others in the geologic record, stretching back 500 million years.) “Extinction is now proceeding thousands of times faster than the production of new species,”...

happyscrappy 12y ago
This part stuck out for me. "Again and again, time has proven the Malthusian pessimists wrong."
- datashovel 12y ago
  I get the impression you read that passage as a "feeling" or a "belief". I read it as the person quoted was citing scientific fact that, regardless whether the outcome for humans is negative or positive, is an observable phenomenon in the physical world. I have no stake personally in whether it will turn out good or bad for humans, though of course I wish no ill upon future generations. However, the fact is I will be long gone before anyone will know what the impact will be.
  - happyscrappy 12y ago
    How in the world would you get the impression that it was a feeling? You are projecting your and the medias doom mantra. Malthusian pessimists were wrong, sorry.
    - datashovel 12y ago
      "doom" and "pessimism" are human constructs. In the objective physical world things "are" or "are not". The quote says that objectively verifiable facts indicate the earth is experiencing a mass extinction. There is no such thing as "doom" or "pessimism" besides that in which humans perceive it.
      - 12y ago

brlewis 12y ago

Deer need predators. Humans need higher income and education: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence

zzalpha 12y ago

Sounds like we need to do our job as apex predators. 'course, that won't make some animal rights folks happy, but until the natural predator population rebounds (which it may never do), it's our responsibility to at least clean up our own mess and do the job for them.

protonfish 12y ago
It's the wolves that are the apex predators, not us. Natural hunters prey and the very young and old, the sick and weak. Human trophy hunters target almost exclusively mature males. Not only does this do nothing to thin the herd of its weakest members, it does little to make a significant reduction of population. There is no reason to think that if half of the male population were culled, any fewer does would be pregnant the following year.
- nonameface 12y ago
  Not all hunters are trophy hunters, that is just a subset of hunters. Numbers from my state show close to a 50/50 split between antlered/anterless (Note: Anterless may contain some bucks, but the hunter thought they were shooting a doe) http://wvmetronews.com/2015/01/16/final-numbers-on-2014-deer-seasons/ http://wvmetronews.com/2015/01/16/final-numbers-on-2014-deer... The breakdown on each season: Firearm Buck season 37,766 bucks, antlerless firearms hunting, 39,514 antlerless deer, archery season, 21,653 deer and 5,290 deer during muzzleloader season.
  - ky3 12y ago
    But are the anterless hunters doing it because they want to? Or because they are forced to by law? Meaning, all hunters are actually trophy hunters, just that for every trophy they bag, they must haul out -- at their own expense -- non-trophies.

blakeja 12y ago

Pretty good documentary "The Private Life of Deer" that speaks towards deer overpopulation a bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9t0sYnIGBo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9t0sYnIGBo Should be on Netflix as well.

gbog 12y ago

Why don't they eat them? Deer meat is excellent, much better than this industrial red and humid plastic sold as beef in the U.S. In France I heard boars are too many, and destroy the crops. Let's make a new trend in haute cuisine: boar meat as the new flavor. It can't be worse than molecular cuisine. Also, it's is much better from animal rights point of view: boar life is better than those of industrial pork generating machines (aka pigs).

epsylon 12y ago
Boar is also delicious when cooked well !
ky3 12y ago
Why don't they eat them? The USA has a tradition of being a land of plenty and so people eat what they have always eaten before. For almost all of America that means chicken or beef, invariably. And turkey during that time of the year. They have no tradition of organ meat, meaning liver, tripe, hoofs, etc. The conservatism in tastes mean a lot of work cut out for anyone trying to sell new food in what is still a highly industrialized landscape and high barriers-to-entry sales channels. E.g. if you're poor you eat deer until you grow up traumatized by it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9351269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9351269

cmurf 12y ago

Meanwhile in Colorado, just a couple years ago, officials were freaking out about the mule deer population dropping. And they're all, we have to bring back our deer! I wonder if a combination of drought and previous overgrazing is the source of that drop.

cmurf 12y ago

If we were smarter, we'd go back to more native grasses and eating the animals that eat those grasses if we can't eat those grasses ourselves. What we do instead is the exact opposite. We destroy the native grasses, bring in non-native plants to grow non-native animals and then eat those animals. Sometimes I think I'm an alien, and scoff at how proud humans are of their ignorance and hubris. But hey, good luck with that.

cmurf 12y ago

"Ecosystem damage becomes apparent at roughly 15 deer per square mile..." And yet http://dnr.wi.gov/topic/hunt/documents/abungoals.pdf http://dnr.wi.gov/topic/hunt/documents/abungoals.pdf The numbers in red are well higher than 15. So if that's right, it seems like Wisconsin (for example) would need to reduce its deer population by at least 50%. That's quite the culling.