On Saturday, 12 February 2022 at 05:44:57 UTC+10:30, Dave P. wrote:
> As England’s Deer Population Explodes, Some Propose a Mass Cull
> By Fleur Macdonald, July 3, 2021, NYT
>
> CIRENCESTER, England — During a spring day of sun and showers
> in Gloucestershire in southwestern England, Mike Robinson, a
> restaurant owner and self-styled “hunter-gatherer,” was out
> counting the deer on his land. On any given morning he can see
> up to 40. He spotted a hind, a female deer, walking more
> cautiously than normal, a sign that she had company.
>
> “Generally baby roe deer are smaller than the height of the
> grass,” he said. “So very often you just see the top of their
> heads or their ears.” Hinds had only started giving birth in
> recent days. “We’re going to see this colossal increase in
> numbers,” he said, sounding worried.
>
> In a normal year, deer hunters and government culling programs
> help limit the herd, and restaurants form an important market
> for the venison. With the pandemic, hunting and culling stopped,
> the market for venison collapsed and, as a result, the deer
> population of Britain is exploding, decimating the plant life
> that many species depend on.
>
> “Heavy browsing and grazing can impact severely on woodland
> plants and heath land, and salt marsh habitats,” said Martin
> Fowlie, a spokesman for the Royal Society for the Protection of
> Birds. That can lead to declines in bird populations, he added.
>
> To avoid that, some wildlife experts now see a need for drastic
> action to reduce the deer herd, including through an expanded
> program of culling. In Britain, which prides itself as a nation
> of animal lovers, that might be hard for many people to accept.
>
> For some, the answer to making a cull more acceptable is simple:
> “Anything shot must be eaten,” says Tim Woodward, the CEO of the
> Country Food Trust, a charity that distributes game meat, and who
> supports the idea of a mass cull. But even if that would make a
> large-scale cull more palatable to the public, it would present
> a steep logistical challenge that some are only now thinking
> about ways to meet.
>
> While deer are difficult to count, the Royal Society for the
> Prevention of Cruelty to Animals says the population exceeds
> two million, causing over 74,000 traffic accidents a year and
> inflicting heavy damage to crops, woodlands and marshes.
>
> Deer are also among the challenges to Britain’s plans to reduce
> its carbon footprint. The government has said it hopes to increase
> tree planting to about 74,000 acres a year by 2025, up from about
> 25,000 acres a year now, to sequester carbon. Herds of voracious
> deer munching on unprotected saplings could undermine that effort.
>
> Yet the idea of a rapid expansion of hunting and culling has the
> potential to cause upset in a country with a well-developed animal
> rights movement.
>
> “We'll never achieve ecological harmony through the barrel of a gun,”
> Elisa Allen, the director of People for the Ethical Treatment of
> Animals in Britain, said in an interview. “Killing them off only
> causes their population to rebound as lethal initiatives result in
> a spike in the food supply, accelerating the breeding of survivors.”
>
> Ms. Allen says there are many ways to deal with the deer population
> besides culling. “If deer numbers must be reduced,” she says, “the
> key is to leave the deer in peace and target their food sources by
> trimming back low-hanging tree branches, keeping grasses cut short
> and shrouding saplings with corrugated plastic tubes or sleeves,
> deer netting or mesh.”
>
> Advocates of an accelerated cull say that passive measures like
> trimming branches and erecting tall deer fences are impractical
> on a nationwide basis.
>
> Even such a potential critic as Chris Packham, a noted wildlife
> activist, has recommended the culling of deer that destroy the
> dry scrub habitat that serves as a nesting ground for nightingales,
> whose numbers have declined sharply in recent decades.
>
> Charles Smith-Jones of the British Deer Society, a deer welfare
> group, also accepts the need for what he calls “active management,”
> adding: “Of the active methods available, only shooting is really
> practical.”
>
> Advocates of a cull broad enough to bring the population into
> balance say it would ultimately require eliminating as many as a
> million deer through the combined efforts of private landowners,
> licensed shooters and public bodies like Forestry England, which
> manages the nation’s forests, and the Department for Environment,
> Food and Rural Affairs.
>
> Even if a program of that breadth could be organized, and if it
> proved politically possible, that would still leave the problem
> of what to do with all of the meat.
>
> A major hurdle is resistance to venison, which has never been a
> popular menu item in the country. A cull large enough to reduce
> deer to manageable numbers would produce much more meat than
> could be consumed at current levels.
>
> Yet even before the pandemic, nearly 8 million people in Britain
> were struggling to get enough to eat, Parliament’s Environment,
> Food and Rural Affairs Committee reported. Even with the pandemic
> beginning to ease, food charities around the country are coping
> with an increase in demand.
>
> In Britain, venison is not typically eaten at home; it has a
> reputation of being a treat for special occasions.
>
> A campaign started in September 2020 and headed by the Forestry
> Commission to get the British public cooking venison at home has
> yielded some results. The meat is being stocked in more supermarkets,
> and some game dealers are making a business of delivering it to
> people’s doors.
>
> But even as restaurants start to reopen, the supply of venison
> would still far outstrip demand if a cull were on the scale that
> advocates seek.
>
> Advocates say some of the excess should go to the food banks that
> proliferated during the pandemic. City Harvest London supplied
> 300,000 meals in February 2020. A year later, it had provided over
> a million, some of them with venison.
>
> Operating on an even larger scale is the Country Food Trust, which
> since its founding in 2015 has distributed over two million meals
> to more than 1,900 charities throughout Britain, often using cuts
> of meat from game dealers like Mr. Robinson and MC Kelly.
>
> Since October, it has provided over 167,000 portions of venison
> Bolognese and a roughly equivalent amount of plain mincemeat.
> “The majority is prioritized towards children,” said Tim Woodward,
> the trust’s chief executive. “I would buy every bit of venison I
> could get my hands on now, because we have a never-ending need for it.”
>
> Forestry England, which is part of the Forestry Commission, sells
> about 265 tons of venison annually — enough for 2.4 million meals —
> to game dealers, among them MC Kelly, who then sell it on.
>
> As a starting point, Mr. Woodward of the Country Food Trust has
> been lobbying for the Forestry Commission to donate all deer
> carcasses to his group as a cost-effective way for the government
> to tackle food poverty quickly.
>
> That would be a huge undertaking and would require major changes
> to distribution. But the effort is gathering momentum. One prominent
> supporter of the Country Food Trust is Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, a
> longtime member of Parliament and the chairman of the All Party
> Parliamentary Group for Shooting and Conservation, which includes
> about 400 politicians.
>
> In an interview, Mr. Clifton-Brown acknowledged that change could
> be slow, as Forestry England is an autonomous public body that is
> used to selling the deer, even at rock-bottom prices, rather than
> giving it away. “It’s a whole change of psyche for them to do this.
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/world/europe/uk-deer-cull.html

Reintroduce wolves to control deer herds. Britain once had wolves.