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Comment by sogen | Hacker News Reader

Wow, didn't know that there's a deer ultraoverpopulation.

Very interesting reading, thanks a lot!

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-inform...)

That's awesome.

There's a pretty interesting article about the efforts in GA to manage the deer population: 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.

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 :-)

Wow, that's a great idea, thanks a lot for sharing

(and I never thought I'd click a NRA link, specially on HN)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wow, had no idea about the history of the scottish dilemma but it makes sense. Thanks!

All UK fauna is a mess currently. The terrestrial 'top predator' is the fox and when the biggest natural predator is of that size this speaks volumes.

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.

It definitely wasn't Scotland, but I saw a video on a "You Rage, You Lose" thread where they had animal rights protesters going up to hunters on their own land and yelling at them for killing deer. The hunters tried explaining why they had to do it and were shut down with "YOU'RE KILLING ANIMALS."

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.

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.

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