My Shetlander colleague blames the vikings. It’s slightly more nuanced than that. But he ain’t wrong either!
Grouse moors maintained for rich cunt sport, artificially high deer populations for rich cunt sport, and a conservative sheep farming culture.
Three main reasons at least, in no particular order.
Also, a depressing portion of our forestry is maintained only for industrial use, so when you see expanses of spruce they’re basically just more biodiversity deserts. If you ever try walking into one, the silence is deafening.
Edit: have now read the article. My tl;dr seems about right.
I agree with what you say, but whilst rich cunts are responsible for the artificially high deer numbers, the lack of any natural predators means we are relying on these unnatural ones as the only way to fund any control on the deer population. No rich cunts means more deer unfortunately. I would love to see this change, but the only realistic way at the minute is for public money to pay rich cunt landowners even more to manage deer population. The reintroduction of the
lynxguillotine would have positive effects though.There could also be an enforced ban on feeding herds and providing salt licks, and more aggressive culling - maybe even through non-profit/community schemes. Or penalise landowners for having too many deer roaming their hills.
But yes, in the absence of large predators there does need to be more shooting. Maybe that feels at odds with our anti-gun society, but that’s really just stopping poor people from having guns since so many rich cunts go out with them anyway.
Venison is a delicious meat. There’s something strange about there being an overabundance of deer and yet a rarity and price premium on venison.
Almost every meat eater I know who’s eaten venison really likes it, so where’s the disconnect between the moderate demand and high supply?
Rich twats playing rich games (i.e. corruption) most likely, but I don’t know.
Bit of a markup, and a bit of the scale of production. Sometimes you can get a connection with a deer stalker, often employed by an estate, and can get very reasonable prices (though might have to pick hair and buckshot out). My dad used to trade marmalade for haunches.
Because we burn an area the size of Jamacai repeatedly to keep it that way, and before anyone gets on my case thats just the land area that isn’t supposed to be natural moorland and if you go up there with a shovel its fucking sand the moment you get through the heather roots.
