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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62571p4e7do
Aware I'm reading this at face value but find it amusing that the article says the reporting shows a dip of deer collisions in 21/22 with an increase in 23 - with no mention that the pandemic meant far fewer drivers on the road so much lower chance of a deer being hit...
I've a personal gripe with deer numbers as since the start of March I've only had 1 bike ride where I haven't pulled at least 1 tick off myself...and I'm seeing far more deer in more populated and built up areas...in my uneducated opinion, there needs to be a cull (but absolutely no idea how and where the meat would then go as if you flood the market with more venison it gets cheaper and that won't work for a lot of people) - I don't think being taken out by a car is a suitable method though - for animal primarily but also not good for the driver or vehicle.
Anyway, rubbish topic heading and a rubbish ramble, but the BBC news article is slightly interesting.
I have no problem with cheaper venison
Deer populations have grown hugely. They have no natural predators. Some estates have reduced numbers but many have allowed them to increase. They have overgrazed the hillsides leading to malnourished deer in poor condition in some places.
There needs to be a massive cull right across scotland
Another way to improve ecology, help bio diversity and reduce lyme disease carrying ticks would be to stop the release of pheasants and kill the remaining ones?
In the UK, around 47 million common pheasants (Phasianus colchicus Linnaeus 1758) are released each year for recreational shooting (Aebischer 2019). The biomass of pheasants in late summer is estimated to be equivalent to that of all native UK breeding birds combined (Blackburn and Gaston 2021) but the ecological consequences of these releases are still poorly understood (Madden et al. 2023). One potential consequence of pheasant release is the amplification of zoonotic pathogens, in particular Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato (Johnson et al. 1984; Kurtenbach, Carey, et al. 1998; Kurtenbach, Peacey, et al. 1998). Borrelia burgdorferi s.l. is the causative agent of Lyme disease, the most prevalent vector-borne zoonotic disease in the northern hemisphere (Lindgren and Jaenson 2006). Pheasants can harbour hundreds of Ixodes ricinus (Linnaeus 1758) ticks (Hoodless et al. 2002), the vector of B. burgdorferi s.l., and experimental trials in captivity have demonstrated that pheasants can contract and re-transmit B. burgdorferi s.l. to and from I. ricinus (Craine et al. 1997; Kurtenbach, Carey, et al. 1998; Kurtenbach, Peacey, et al. 1998). However, the impact of pheasant release on tick abundance and Borrelia sp. prevalence in ticks, in ecologically relevant contexts, has not yet been quantified.
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