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The story
In Nagano Prefecture’s Southern Alps, a deer herd large enough to blanket an entire mountainside was caught on camera, leaving local residents stunned — “I’ve never seen numbers like this.” According to a report from the TV Asahi network, roughly 500 deer were counted. On 5ch, the discussion thread sprawled in every direction: whether wolves, the deer’s natural predator, should be reintroduced; worries about a food-chain domino effect where more deer means more food for bears, and therefore more bears; and even why venison and deer leather haven’t caught on more widely.
Massive deer herd in the Southern Alps — 500 blanket the mountainside, locals say “never seen anything like it”
Sun, Aug 30, 11:18 AM JST
TV Asahi (ANN)
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Germany
Apparently 4,000 sheep a year get eaten there now, thanks to the growing wolf population.
No need to listen to a single word the Wolf Society says.
It's because gun hunting isn't done anymore.
You're off the mark.
Isn't it wolves that are the top of the ecosystem?
Japan wiped them out, so maybe it's bears now.
We wrecked the ecosystem ourselves — serves us right.
This is just the beginning, folks.
They're going to increase?
But if they eat the grass, isn't that a good thing?
Saves us the trouble of dangerous weeding work
lol
We're going to need to replant protective forests lol
Even uneducated me knows there are downsides to wild deer spreading all over Japan.
I saw one too. I'm in Hyogo, and on my way home after 6pm a deer was eating grass in the rain.
Thanks for the rare photo.
Guess we're really heading back to how things were 500 years ago.
Literally "grazing on the road" (a pun — 道草を食う normally means "to dawdle," but here the deer's actually eating grass on the road).
It was dark, so I brightened the photo on my phone.
There were two families of them.
Can't speak for bear, but boar and deer are genuinely tasty.
It's just a pain to commercialize — tasty ways to cook them already exist.
More than the cooking method, it's the processing done right after the kill that completely changes how the meat tastes.
The problem with game meat is you can't process it assembly-line style like livestock.
In winter when food is scarce,
they strip tree bark bare and kill the trees on the mountain.
https://www.shinrin-ringyou.com/topics/img/shika_mondai/00.jpg
In Nara Park, the tree trunks are wrapped in metal netting, right?
https://imgur.com/DEAnMku.jpeg
The antlers went into Chinese medicine, and the supple hide was essential for crafts and other goods.
But now leather like that's been replaced by synthetic materials, so it doesn't sell anymore, I guess.
The bizarre obsession with cost-cutting after the bubble economy collapsed gutted Japan's local industries.
Hunting culture included.
Koshu Inden… that's seriously great leather~ (a traditional deerskin craft from Yamanashi)
https://news.tv-asahi.co.jp/articles_img/900198309_img_32a2310dea57ca867786fb3920a84b1497274.jpg
https://news.tv-asahi.co.jp/articles_img/900198309_img_1acda242d88af2eb31452c119554ee15126329.jpg
That's a massive amount of animal protein!!
I figured 500 deer in the mountains was pretty normal, but seeing them packed this densely into such a narrow space… yeah, this is actually alarming.
They could probably win a one-on-one against a deer, but deer are too quick to actually catch.
Hunting and eating a deer is a hassle.
Even bears will go for the easier meal if one's available.
Humans hunt them, bears eat them.
Next up to boom: bears 🐻
Bears are biologically omnivores and eat pretty much anything, but their actual diet gets passed down culturally.
In other words, cubs raised by parents who mainly eat acorns and never touch meat grow up eating the same way.
It's been observed that meat-eating can start when bears are forced into it during a famine, or when a carnivorous bear turns up in a neighboring range and others "witness it eating meat" firsthand.
So while bears are omnivores by biology, their real-world diet shifts through this kind of cultural transmission.
Apparently some researchers have floated a hypothesis that meat-eaters tend to turn more aggressive while plant-eaters stay docile and timid, but whether that's actually true is unclear.
Deer leather is a luxury item.
It's delicious in season.
Though it does have that unavoidable gamey smell.
Background and key points of the debate
Deer numbers in Japan have kept climbing largely because the Japanese wolf, once their natural predator, went extinct in the Meiji era, removing the mechanism that used to keep populations in check. On top of that, an aging and shrinking hunter population has lowered culling pressure, turning damage to forests and farmland into a nationwide problem. The thread split over several points: whether to reintroduce wolves, the knock-on food-chain effect where more deer means more food for bears (and therefore more bears), and the decline of hunting culture alongside falling demand for hide and antler products. One thing readers may overlook — and which posters in the thread pointed out themselves — is that the real bottleneck to using venison and deer leather isn’t a lack of tasty recipes; it’s the shortage of facilities to process the meat immediately after the kill (a gap in Japan’s game-meat processing infrastructure).
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Express+) thread “【🦌🦌🦌】Massive deer herd in the Southern Alps — 500 blanket the mountainside, locals say “never seen anything like it” — Nagano.”
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