What the Deer Are Telling Us
nautil.us
nautil.us
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.
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.
As for an overpopulated animal, I imagine there must be a better way to deal with that than allowing people to shoot them. Don't get me wrong, I'm not some bleeding heart when it comes to animals, they aren't all perfect snowflakes of uniqueness, I don't don't see the reason to cause an animal that can feel pain to feel that pain without a good cause. To me, "we've been doing it for generations" is not a good cause.
Edit: I'm still interested in having this discussion, but preferably along one of the established threads sprouting from this, unless the point of view hasn't been covered in a reply. There's as little point in me replying the same thing multiple times as there is in having multiple replies to this stating the same thing, but that doesn't mean there aren't interesting things to be said on this topic.
Secondly, I'm not sure how we can assume that the old and sickly animals are the ones being killed when humans hunt. I would assume it's a statistically higher percentage of them, but I would also assume it much less statistically relevant than with a bow, and that less than with a spear. On the other end of the spectrum, I would imagine killing deer by dropping a bomb on them would result in no statistical difference in the kills compared to the normal herd make-up. Technology lessens the "we kill the old and sickly" argument.
Any ideas? I imagine the main causes of death for deer are predation (by humans, or other animals depending on location), and getting hit by cars. I imagine the latter is at least as painful as the former on average, and the latter also kills and injures a lot of humans.
Are you suggesting that non-human predators cause less pain to deer than human hunters with guns? I highly doubt that is the case.
The ecosystem you speak of was destroyed when the apex predators were removed generations ago . Re-introducing predators does two things (look it up):
1) Disperses the herds thereby extending their range, and 2) causes some serious (unmanageable) peaks and valleys in populations of prey (rabbits, deer, moose, etc...) until equilibrium is reached (if ever)
Apex predator birth rate is low and it would take years to have a noticeable effect. Of course, releasing enough predators to "thin the herd", so to speak, requires an unsustainable predator population once the thinning is complete. So you get mange, starvation, fido goes missing, etc...
Hunters on the other hand only get as many deer tags as needed to control the populations. With that said, I agree that predators should be brought back in limited numbers and allowed reach natural sustainable levels within the ecosystem. But to use them as a short term way of controlling deer density is silly. You don't fix a complex, interconnected system build over decades with a band-aid.
In truth, this is all fairly removed from my original statement and intent, which was that if some hunters are no longer allowed to hunt an area and feel disgruntled, I have little sympathy.
Thus the vegetation can cope with loses as ever did and not just dies.
> causes some serious (unmanageable) peaks and valleys in populations of prey
Peaks and valleys are caused by diseases and famines, wolves are the worst enemy for livestock and wild deer diseases, so the final result is deer populations more stable and health in fact.
People, specially children, would be also much more safe with wolves than without them, because... first of all, less car accidents with deer, second: less americans killed or having pain by Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Tularemia, Ehrlichiosis, Relapsing fever, Colorado tick fever or Babesiosis. All tickborne diseases, spread by deer or small carnivores, that are a much bigger threat for children playing outdoors because ticks are everywhere in deerland.
> Apex predator birth rate is low and it would take years to have a noticeable effect
Not necessarily, because the "ecology of fear" change the behaviour of preys. You don't need to wipe out all deer at all. In Yellowstone wolves changed all for better in just five or six years if I'm not wrong.
Coyotes do adapt but they aren't generally capable of taking down deer. But humans with guns are. As a hunter myself, shooting deer is a quick for the deer and good for the hunter in various ways, not all of which have to do with eating.
Feeding them is going to result in an even greater population. Moving them probably isn't viable (they will just do the same thing in the new spot).
And of course, strictly herbivore species are very good at their main business. They fight and win every day against the poison maker's masters: plants and mushroms. If you put an alcaloid in a potato, in most cases even the dumbest deer know 1) What is this thing and what plant produces it. 2) that this is not safe to eat just smelling it at 5 miles of distance.
So now instead of excessive amounts of deer, there are excessive amounts of wolves in the region.
..Introduce snakes to curtail wolves now? And than mongoose.
The Mongoose will die off in the winter.
I'm all for reintroducing more predators, but suburban sprawlers tend to get upset when their pets get eaten regularly.
Of course, at the end of the day you're still ultimately in a "the deer population stabilizes at the point that deer start starving to death" situation, but you can at least lower the deer population to minimize both their impact on the environment and the number of adverse deer-car interactions.
It may be, but please justify that statement. I think I've outlined in depth my point of view farther down multiple of these responses, and while obviously I don't think I was being ignorant, it's not clear to me that you are responding to an actual point of mine, or whether you are making assumptions as to my reasoning and responding to that.
> The fact is that almost universally hunting is a more ethical form of gathering meat than farming.
What type of farming? Is it more ethical than traditional farming? Who says this discussion is just about gathering meat. There's also the consideration of managing a deer population.
> By far the most committed and caring ecologists that I've meet ... have mostly been hunters/fishermen.
Did I make some argument that hunters were bad people? I don't remember that, and if it was implied, it was accidental.
This topic touches on a few highly charged areas of discussion; hunting, farming, animal population/ecosystem management. People have strong points of view on this, and have an idea of what their opponents already believe. I think I deserve the benefit of a doubt before being labeled with specific beliefs.
Of course, this wouldn't be a problem if we didn't have cities and highways everywhere, but we're pretty much past that.
Every animal will feel pain at one point or another.
If an area's deer population is too high to be supported, there will be a lot of pain. Deer will starve to death. Deer will wander out looking for food and be struck by automobiles. Deer will contract CWD and that's really not a good way to die.
I don't think that anyone would claim that a rifle bullet is a "good" way to die but it is a lot less torturous than these others.
So we enter a cost/benefit analysis of the situation, and the cost of "humane" solutions are immense. On the other hand, ethical hunting is a "lesser of two evils" that you've mentioned, but more importantly, it brings money back into the organizations protecting the environment. Many people don't realize the cost of a single hunting tag is very well calculated, regulated, and almost 100% of the profits go into ecosystem preservation and conservation. Closest thing to a win-win scenario we can get at the present, not to mention the act of hunting can be an industry in and of itself generating revenue and business.
This is a natural, humane view. IMO, it comes from a good place. If I didn't have the knowledge I have, I would also hold this view.
Bonafides: I grew up hunting. I wouldn't say it was subsistence hunting, but it was a substantial portion of our winter protein. I was blissfully ignorant of it at the time, but we were what you would consider poor today. (Pretty much all my friends were poor too.)
I stopped hunting after college when my father did - we both liked nature but we didn't like killing.
Hunting is probably the least terrible way for an animal to die. If you are removed from nature, you may not realize that nature while beautiful, is also horribly, horribly cruel. In winter, the deer starve, get weak and then are run down by predators and killed or freeze to death. If the snow it deep, they may not even have to be weak since they can't run as fast in the deep snow.
I can only think of 2 less cruel ways for population control: extinction (or a localized equivalent) and birth control. The 2nd option might be viable...
I sympathize with your view. The thing is, the alternatives to hunting are all crueler than hunting. The dilemma thus becomes choosing between
(a) humans taking pleasure in killing animals (which should bother anyone IMO)
(b) animals suffering more when nature does its thing
Those are admittedly sucky choices but that is the reality at this point in time at least. The modern "solution" is to hide the reality behind some facade that lets us maintain our a more pleasant mental model of our world and our place in it e.g. I don't torture chickens, I get my eggs from the grocery store.
The question is somewhat ridiculous, there are easily many differences depending on your stance on the importance of sapience, etc, but that doesn't mean there aren't important facets to examining why it's different, and what beliefs hold up or do not under careful examination after deciding what the important differences are.
I thought about it some and I think the difference is that for humans, we have other less horrible choices than animals.
Our choices aren't (a) get eaten by wolves or (b) starve to death (c) get shot by a hunter
At end of life we humans can get palliative care for example. I sympathize with your rebellion if you will, against the cruel choices nature has presented the other denizens of our planet. However, one must consider the reality not what we simply wish the reality was unfortunately.
A) Why do you imagine that?
B) Why do you think what you imagine is a fact that's relevant to this discussion?
Our imaginations suck. This is just a fact. We can imagine a dozen impossible things before breakfast, and then fail to imagine a dozen possible things after lunch.
This is why the discipline of science is so important: it forces us to test our imaginings before asserting they are interesting or relevant, at which point they are no longer just imaginings, but evidence.
To the question at hand, hunting is, on the evidence, one of the most efficient, most effective, most humane ways of limiting the population of wild animals. As well as contributing to conservation efforts financially, hunters are a tool used by fish and wildlife departments to limit populations that would otherwise face periodic catastrophic crashes due to disease and starvation. There are other ways this can be done, but they are in general more expensive, less effective, and less humane. It's hard to kill animals like deer, and the fact that there are people willing to pay for the privilege of doing it is a boon to wildlife management.
Once a rural area with an overabundance of deer becomes re-zoned as a "residential area" the hunters often can't hunt at all, and a heavily overpopulated species becomes effectively a protected species in that area.
You had a situation where generations of people kept things in balance. Farmers got rid of the wolves, hunters naturally managed the herd of deer. Many people relied on venison as a staple food. Then people show up who are afraid of hunters/guns/noise/etc and do dumb things like feed the wildlife and call the cops when they become a nuisance.
That's not to say someone won't come up with a justification that I'll fully accept. I didn't say "oh, hunting is horrible, how could a person ever do that!", I said I didn't have much sympathy, and that's because I don't agree with the justifications I've heard to this point.
My personal point of view is that wildlife are both a natural resource and living animals., As a natural resource, the usage should come with some sort of associated cost, to account for the damage it's usage and/or removal causes to the environment (e.g. burning coal has negative externalities that are poorly accounted for to this point). As living animals that feel pain, I think there should be a reason to cause that pain, and or kill them. It needs to be justifiable, but for me the bar is not impossibly high. "I needed the food to survive" is fully capable as a justification in my eyes, while "It's fun" is not. obviously there's a fuzzy space in the middle, which I'm not sure the details of.
Ideally though, I would like vat grown meat. To many, that sounds disgusting. To me, it sounds like a reproducible process that can eventually be perfected to give very specific types of meat as needed. Perfect steaks every time. It solves a lot of other problems at the same time, so bonus.
I'm aware that the previous, and my stance on hunting, is all very pie-in-the-sky. I still think it's a worthwhile discussion.
(In the sense that a controlled deer population results in greater diversity of plant species over the long term. Of course the relative value of plant species and deer are subjective)
There is very little young cedar, directly as a result of deer. If you drive along US 2 in the UP of Michigan, you can see that all the trees along the road look like they are trimmed. It is from deer browse, they eat everything they can reach.
That's why I pointed out that it is better for plants to have less deer. It's subjective, but it's possible to believe that shooting a deer is a direct, net benefit to the environment, rather than a cost.
If you truly care about the ethics of the situation, hunting should be vastly preferred as a means of obtaining food over the current status quo of factory farming. A quick death by bullet is far, far better than a life of squalor and misery followed by, far more frequently than we'd like to realize, an agonizing and slow death.
Is it impossible to look for other paths? I don't believe the discussion should be reduced to the two extremes of "shoot them with guns" or "factory farm them". Our current and past situations need not be the only choices when facing the future.
You seem to want to live in a world where animals live peaceful lives and die gently in their sleep. We do not live in such a world. Right now, the alternative to shooting them is to have them violently eaten by predators or drawn-out death by poison. If we do nothing to control their populations, those that survive will eventually age to the point where most will become infirm enough to die slowly by starvation. Unless you propose to sent vets into the woods armed with tranquilizers and materials for lethal injection, a bullet is virtually certain to be the least terrible way for a deer to die.
I said, I didn't have a lot of sympathy for hunters not being able to hunt. Then I clarified, I thought killing of animals should be justified, and gave specific examples of where I thought it was, and was not, justified. For the record, ecosystem management (population control), in the absence of better options, is a good justification for hunting in my eyes.
If the the animal population doesn't need management, do I think enjoyment of hunting or tradition justifies it? No.
> You seem to want to live in a world where animals live peaceful lives and die gently in their sleep.
That, there, is a straw man argument being set up. I haven't said this, and I believe my other responses around this topic have made that abundantly clear. Please don't put words in my mouth.
> Right now, the alternative to shooting them is to have them violently eaten by predators
Yep. So what? There's a reason for that. The life of the predator and the ecosystem as a whole works because of this process. I'm just not sure what I'm expected to believe hunting, for hunting's sake, is supposed to contribute.
In the deer example, as noted in the article, overpopulation strips forests down. Saplings get chewed down by starving deer, bark gets stripped from others, etc. The elimination of forage impacts other wildlife. By being "nice" to Bambi, you'll have a dead forest in 30-40 years, assuming a condo complex isn't dropped down from the sky.
Apart from extinction, I don't care how the deer population as a whole is managed. Individually, I would prefer to cause the least amount of pain to an animal as possible for the needed outcome, where that outcome is dictated by the needs of society and the individual (and in this specific case, I don't consider entertainment a need). I'm fully accepting of, and vastly prefer. the idea of animals raising in traditional farm settings when we need to cull them, and if they need to be killed, doing so in a quick and humane manner.
I am not disputing that deer need to be managed. If the only way we can seem to do that is through hunting, then okay, I consider it justified. I think effort should also be put into finding alternatives to managing the population. We need this in many other cases as well, where hunting isn't feasible. The salient point for me is that the hunting fulfills a need for society and the ecosystem, and if that need subsides, so should the hunting.
A large bullet through the heart and lungs is probably not going to be much worse than slaughtering livestock. (This is also why states set minimum caliber for hunting deer -- too small increases the risk of the deer dying too slowly.)
The salient point for me is that the hunting fulfills a need for society and the ecosystem, and if that need subsides, so should the hunting.
This is already the way of things. The number of licenses issued for a given year is the DNR's response to the current state of the deer population.
I think you may be romanticizing things a bit. How many generations are you using for a sample-size, and how do you know things were any more "in-balance" as opposed to just a different equally-artificial arrangement?
I'll grant you "nobody complained of too-many deer around their house", but that's a far cry from some sort of "we were one with the land and lived in harmony with all the cycles of nature".
Why not?
As far as I know there's not much of an issue with the farms and orchards in town. (On the other hand, it's a pretty rural town and doesn't have much in the way of new high-end residential developments.)
I used to live in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. As the name implies, before Wheat Ridge was a suburb of Denver, it was named after the abundance of farmers in the area. My dad and grandparents lived there when you could still see cattle or horses on in some places. The local high school's sports team is even named "the Farmers."
So there was something romantic about having the one of the last farms in Wheat Ridge right next to my neighborhood. The owner was too stubborn to sell until a couple of years ago, because the city had no means of forcing the sale of the land. Despite the nostalgia, everyone pretty much hated the farm because it dragged down land values and contributed little tax income to the city compared to the ~40 or so houses that are now replacing it.
In my view, agriculture seems to work against the interests of an expanding suburb or city, and shouldn't be encouraged if it has a negative impact on surrounding homeowners.
So... You support the idea that we will eventually get rid of all farms in favour of suburbia? How will this not end up negatively affecting the world around us?
I'd find it pretty horrible if the city did have the means to force the sale of the land so that developers could build more houses. Gentrification of any sort has plusses and minuses but I'm generally pretty opposed to the government imposing it by forcing people to move out and sell their property.
It astonishes me how obstinately self-centered people can be.
The farm was there long before the interlopers built their houses. It's not selfish or stubborn for a farmer to continue to farm, even if other people have recently decided that the land would be better used for McMansions.
It's one thing if we're discussing the expansion of farming into suburban areas but this is suburban sprawl into rural land.
First come, first served and all of that.
The family of the farmer that I described elsewhere in the thread had literally farmed their 500 acre land for nearly 400 years. Their original land grant from a Dutch Patroon called for annual taxes of 2 pigs and 5 bushels of wheat. They did nothing wrong. They have title to the land.
Why is that family's property rights inferior to those of folks building sprawl homes?
They aren't. They also aren't inherently superior and deserving of special privilege by virtue of being older. Otherwise we'd kick off the farmers, the natives who were there before, and every single form of life until the area degenerated to nothing but blue-green algae.
Also, the idea that a position is wrong because it offends or fails to respect someone else's beliefs in arbitrarily selected (but unspecified) ways is one that is offensive and disrespectful.
So there are restrictions on pretty much any use of property in a given town or state. The ability to build a house, run a farm, or build an asphalt plant is allowed or not allowed by the zoning. It's not about having a special "right to farm" any more or less than it's about having a special "right to build a house."
EDIT: Just add that the "right to farm" bylaws are mostly a reminder, especially to newcomers, that people have, um, a right to farm based on existing zoning. So don't move into our country town and then start a petition to close down the dairy farm down the street because it gets a bit smelly now and then during the summer.
That, I suppose, is a long way of saying that zoning can change. And sometimes other regulations change in ways that are inconvenient for some, especially when those people have failed to make a compelling case for why things should not change. We call this "democracy".
You have no legitimate right to demand that anyone do anything with their property based on your preference.
Which is to say you can demand all you like, but until enough people agree with you the right way it doesn't matter.
"Right to farm" rules are an example of democracy in action.
At its best, it keeps industrial sites from being built within certain residential areas. At its meanest, it's used to create economically and racially segregated communities, oust families from their homes, and freeze cities in time. Upholding its use for any of the latter could generally be assumed to be the result of particularly stubborn and selfish mindsets towards one's own convenience.
Also troubling about current US zoning practices are its weird exclusive use-per-zone rules, the threat to one's right to unencumbered use of their land, arbitrary development cost increases within cities (contributing to sprawl), and rent increases from zoning exploitation to artificially raise a community's median property values, and, as a side effect, driving up the rent in surrounding areas.
I consider these and any act which would potentially lead to the eviction of someone from their home to be much larger threats to the availability of equitable and affordable housing than people with the wealth to be mobile being bothered by not having the right to control what others do on and with their own property.
> Despite the nostalgia, everyone pretty much hated the farm because it dragged down land values and contributed little tax income to the city compared to the ~40 or so houses that are now replacing it.
Only 40 houses? Do you realize how much "everyone pretty much hate"s suburbanite breeders like you?
Hypocrite.
While those 40 homes lead to greater tax revenue, the amount of expense they demand is even greater.
Anywhere I've lived, even sky-high property tax NJ, the property tax coming from a single home is rather less than the town is paying to educate a single child. So unless the average child density in that development is much less than 1 (say, 0.75 children per house), despite the town collecting more taxes, they'll be spending much more on schools, and it'll be a net loss. And that's before we consider the cost of other services at all...
The result is an explosion of deer, to the point where you can't walk across the front yard without being careful of stepping on their landmines. They're also a serious danger to motorists - my wife had three deer accidents inside of two years.
This article doesn't mention another effect on the environment that I've observed in NJ, and also at a cabin that we have in NY's Catskills - that is, the rise of coyotes and "coydog" hybrids. Although these predators are shy and rarely seen, you can frequently hear them yipping and howling.
One thing that impressed me about the rise of the coyotes was a few Christmases ago. On Christmas Eve, a deer that had apparently been struck by a car dragged itself to our front yard and died. Not wanting to wake up Christmas morning to that, I tied a rope around the body and dragged it way off into the woods. A week later, my wife was curious about what had become of it and we walked back to look. Just one week after being dumped there, the only sign there had been a deer at all was a spine attached to a pelvis, and a bunch of ribs. One week farther on, even those were gone.
So it looks to me like, while the rise of deer is damaging the plant ecology below it, it's also changing the predator ecology above as well.
Today when I pull into my driveway at night there are always several deer peering back. before they dart off into the woods.
On the flip side, I do think we should probably migrate some deer populations to those areas seeing desertification to encourage more plant/brush growth. It may be more homogenous, but it's better than barren land. I'm thinking that there should be some efforts to make venison more appealing to people, and perhaps start stocking it in regular grocers.
Upon thinking about it, I'm not sure there are many wild meats you can buy outside of fish (and fish is almost always frozen to negative temperatures to reduce exposure to possible bacteria).
It makes a lot of sense for a large population but it'd be nice if there was a viable way to use wild venison (and maybe horse, aren't mustangs running wild in the west?).
[1] http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/San-Mateo-Residents-Wit...
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?"
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.
[0]http://co.monmouth.nj.us/documents/127/deer_annual_report_20...
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,”..."Again and again, time has proven the Malthusian pessimists wrong."
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.
There is no such thing as "doom" or "pessimism" besides that in which humans perceive it.
Lack of water, mass starvation, and other similar problems should be more of a concern than whether a news story "bothers someone".
I get the impression that many people with views which (for the most part) dismiss warnings about environmental issues, etc. have a fundamental belief that the earth will always be habitable by human beings. (forgive me if I'm putting words in your mouth).
Whereas I, along with probably many others who are more sensitive to environmental issues, think this is far from a certainty.
EDIT: Didn't know the numbers off the top of my head, but here's what Google had to say:
1) # of years where life has existed on Earth: 3.5 billion
2) # of years humans have been on earth: 200,000
EDIT #2: Given these numbers it seems uncertain we're anything more than an anomaly (ie. intelligent life) in the history of life on earth.
Yes, and we are humans, who discuss things in a human context. You can discard anything with "it's just a human construct". Where are you trying to go with that?
true && true === true
Similar with events that occur on earth. If humans weren't around to experience a mass extinction there would be nothing "pessimistic" or "doomsday" about it. It would simply be an event that occurred in the history of planet earth.
Now let's consider scientific studies. Imagine the following statement:
We have done a large scale study on the number of
species on earth. We identified X total species in 2003
and we identified X-1000 total species in 2004. Every
year since this date we have identified fewer and fewer
total number of species in this study.
So I would say that it's not the case that you can "discard anything" in this same manner. In fact I think it's an important thing to point out because that's an enormous, unfortunate, and critical misunderstanding of popular culture about what science is and what scientists do.
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.
Meaning, all hunters are actually trophy hunters, just that for every trophy they bag, they must haul out -- at their own expense -- non-trophies.
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).
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:
Very interesting reading, thanks a lot!
(and I never thought I'd click a NRA link, specially on HN)
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.
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.
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.
English people did lots of silly experiments with his fauna. They have six deer not less, including roe, red, fallow and non native introduced Muntjac deer, Sika deer and Chinese Water deer, and even Wallabies. They have of course also cattle, sheeps, horses, rabbits since the roman empire, american grey Squirrels girdling the trees and Ringnecked parrakeets. Guess how many predators are introducted to save the day for the trees?... none. Everybody is grazing.
Some parts of Scottland have a few big trees growing naturally on small islands on lakes and not a single tree in the hills around. The Caledonian forest is bassically vanished nowadays. Scottish should aim higher and try to reintroduce the native european lynx at least, should be very easy because rabbits are a big pest and you have plenty of small islands to make a try and have all the control to go back if necessary, but even this idea face a big psychological wall whith all those sheeps roaming free.
The funny thing is that the hunters are more environmentally aware than the protesters.
Growing up in Massachusetts, there were animal-rights folks who would slash hunters' tires and call the police with reports of "man with a machine gun in the woods." Nope, just another hunter with an SKS, trying to feed his family. I mean Dirty Evil Republican Gun Nut.
And yet
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9t0sYnIGBo
Should be on Netflix as well.