Hunting party found GFG's deer

[GoingNorth]

Marg, your deer are actually fallow deer right? I'm guessing the Brits brought them over for their own hunting pleasure.

Our deer are natives, though we do have fallow deer on some game preserves.

Oddly, the whitetailed deer that live in the Middle and Eastern parts of the US, came very close to becoming extinct during the days of 'market hunting' as did several species of duck, goose, and fish.

[Marguerite]

No, our deer are Rusa deer. Much bigger than fallow deer. And yes, they were released so the gentry couldride to hounds. They also released foxes for the same purpose. Idiots.

Rusa deer come from Java and other parts of SE Asia.
[ame]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javan_Rusa[/ame]

and for some pics - http://images.google.com.au/images?h...ed=0CBAQsAQwAA

I'm very much against hunting anything for pleasure. But hunting for food especially if it's also a species needing to be controlled in numbers - it's important to teach responsibility.

Speaking of cute furry things - we dropped in on my best friend this evening (I needed to collect a garden spade of mine) and she's got rat problems. She's dosed it with rat poison, she did notice the pile of rat poison had definitely been eaten. But a large rat (very definitely rat) was lurking behind her TV cabinet. GFG3 & I had a good look at it, the rat definitely wasn't moving very quickly and on further examination, it left clear evidence of being very unwell. GFG3 commented that it looked very cute and furry. My friend was not impressed with that remark.

She said she'll have no trouble removing the corpse (I'm certain it's on its last legs) so I might get a look at it tomorrow for her, try to see if it's likely to have a nest of offspring somewhere which could be adding to my friend's problems...

I'm not going to offer her any recipes for rat, though!

Marg

[GoingNorth]

Marg, that's a BIG deer. It's in the same family as the red deer and American Elk (you might call it a Wapiti as in some areas "Elk" equals what we call a moose) based on physical structure and antler shape and size.

I can only imagine the PITA those things are in an area like yours where there are no controls are allowed and the environment can't support them at all.

Our deer are native to the continent. Where we've run into problems is that we are taking over their native range, AND we've killed off their natural predators.

In fact, a large reason for the populations of wolves and pumas tanking for so many years was that we'd nearly killed off their main prey.

Now, we've got the deer back and then some, but we don't have the predators to balance out the populations.

I've seen starving deer in the winter and it is horrible. DH hunted so long as he was able to sit out with a rifle and pack out a kill. I used to bowhunt, but my days of being able to handle a bow with the sort of power to kill a large game over are long over...plus, with my tremors, I am not confident in my ability to aim properly and hate the idea of causing undue suffering.

For many years, most of our "winter meat" was whitetail deer.

[Nancy]

Actually Janet I do.

Nancy