Scotland’s publicly-funded forestry bodies have spent more than £134m controlling deer over the last decade, The Ferret can reveal.
The country’s’s deer population is estimated to have reached more than one million, having doubled since the 1990s. In high concentrations, deer can cause numerous issues.
They include the deaths of an estimated 700 people in vehicle collisions in the UK every year, the environmental harm caused by trampling and overgrazing, poor animal welfare due to insufficient food and shelter for deer in winter, and steep economic costs.
I do not believe 700 people are killed each year in the UK in collisions with animals, largely because in 2024 the total number of people killed in all road collisions was just 1,602.
700 people killed per year! I never thought it’d be that high. Genuinely shocked.
" An estimated 700 people die or are injured each year in the UK due to colliding with the animals" - which is slightly more believable. The summary above is probably AI.
I copied and pasted the first few paragraphs from the article - as I typically do with almost all the articles I post here. The text as it stand above is as it was when I copied it this morning. It looks as though they have edited it to read ‘killed or injured’ since then.
Don’t you have hunters there? Just give them permission to shoot deer and problem is solved for free. Well, not entirely for free. Some counting should be done to keep deer population in adequate quantities and avoid overhunting. But those would be thousands, not millions.
We have deer stalkers. This article summarises the process of becoming one.
What rednecks will do is put out food for deer with a camera. When the deer comes for the food, the redneck goes out and shoots them.
Easy. Cheap. And you get a lot of food for it.
