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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