Plans to cull thousands of deer and plant millions of trees in UK’s largest national park met with fury by gamekeepers
Plans to cull thousands of deer and plant millions of trees in UK’s largest national park met with fury by gamekeepers
11 comments
> This includes the restoration of 35,000 hectares of woodland, new licensing systems for shooting estates, and culls of deer to bring numbers down to “sustainable levels”.
[*’Alright the deer population is up to about 17, 18 hundred, realistically we need to get that number down to about five or six of them’*](https://youtu.be/1wq_edHqpdA)
Planting trees is good, as long as its done sensibly. I don’t see why that requires a deer cull as well though.
And these sort of areas are all private land anyway, so the public benefit is usually minimal.
Deer numbers are already a problem for proper management of the existing environment and without drastic cuts reforestation would be next to impossible. While Deer hunting is a business that employs people that isn’t in itself a reason to preserve it, whole sectors of the economy disappear all the time, it may have been charcoal burners that created the moors in the first place.
If we are to re-wild then those Scottish moorland habitats will disappear, they are man made anyway.
The sad reality is these animals have no consistent natural predators so have caused strain on the ecosystem. I genuinely believe Lynx should be reintroduced into Scotland. I don’t recall EVER hearing about a lynx attacking a human. They tend to avoid them and only attack if cornered. The only decent reason people will fight over the reintroduction of the lynx is because they would threaten livestock.
Another thing to mention is I wonder where these trees are coming from exactly. Do they have provenance to the area? Will they be genetically diverse or all genetically similar? These plants need to have genetic diversity otherwise they are just waiting for a disaster to happen such as a disease to come around and wipe them all out.
Really should re-introduce apex predators like lynx and wolves to reduce the deer population if necessary.
Good. When we hunted all the wolves and bears to extinction we left no natural predators for deers and their populations left to their own devices will skyrocket till they cause serious ecological damage and starve themselves to death because of it.
You can do both… shit… deer live in forests… you want to plant forests… deer will generally not attack you unless you attack first. How stupid can they actually be?
Does that mean deer will be cheap for a wile, before it becomes dear again.
Oh no.
Well, let’s get started.
I think the countryside needs a bit less gamekeeping. The environment and the climate are changing. Land management now needs to be more in the hands of the government specialists to secure it for future generations rather than private “sportsmen” with a passion for killing animals.
The solution is simple, reintroduce natural previously endemic predators and let nature take care of itself by letting it rewild itself how it pleases. It does so very quickly.
Rewilding does not equal planting trees. The majority of the time planting trees harms biodiversity
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But no, we can’t reintroduce predators because one might steal some child’s custard cream and lead to newspaper calls to cull them. (Source: [https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1254146/children-left-cowering-in-their-homes-because-of-flocks-of-divebombing-birds-of-prey/](https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1254146/children-left-cowering-in-their-homes-because-of-flocks-of-divebombing-birds-of-prey/)). I do not believe that story for a second. I live somewhere where red kites are widespread and they are very wary of any human activity. They will dive-bomb into empty gardens but never if there is somebody in the garden or even in the adjacent gardens.