 So recently in the media there's been a big push to get people to eat the flesh of hunted deer, sounding the alarm on a kind of existential threat with deer over population, while at the same time marketing deer as a healthy, nutritious meat. This rhetoric made me very suspicious so we started to look into it. Honestly what we found was quite shocking and I think by the end of this video you'll be just as appalled as I am about this whole thing. Whenever you see a big concerted push to kill animals like this, you have to ask yourself, who is benefiting from this? Because it definitely isn't the deer. Now in the UK you will often hear a bunch of deer numbers being thrown around. The most recent being pushed across the media is two million deer, parroted by this MP, Sir Charles Walker, who has been behind the big push in parliament. At around two million animals, the UK's deer population is estimated to now stand at its highest level for a thousand years. You would need to cull somewhere between half a million and 750,000 deer a year, just to keep things stable. Are these numbers even accurate? You'd think by the way they went on about it, they'd have some very strong data to support their proposed massacre of deer. Interestingly, this claim isn't new. You can hear these numbers being used to justify increased culling at least since 2008. But according to the British Deer Society, who apparently did the survey they based these numbers on, said in November 2023, the frequently quoted figure of two million deer is highly questionable. In reality, no one knows for certain how many deer there are in the UK. Current estimates still rely heavily on outdated and limited data. They also mention on their website how anyone even knows the national deer count from a thousand years ago, but MP Charles speaks with such certainty about it. Something needs to be done. We're not exactly sure when or who started the game of pass it on with UK deer numbers soaring at being at two million. When such a number is used to suggest to the public that deer need to start being viewed as some kind of pest that are wreaking havoc across the entire country, it becomes quite worrying. Also, the stat of from repeated that 750,000 deer need to be culled is also dubious. 750,000 deer a year. Just to keep things stable. This claim first emerged in 2013 after Dr. Paul Doleman gathered numbers of just two species of deer by driving 1,000 miles through one area with thermal cameras. Following this, many newspapers and online sources reported that between 50 and 60 percent of the UK's deer population must be culled. Doleman then revealed that his findings were misrepresented. He later told the observer, I didn't say that. I'll just use those figures as hypothetical examples. In fact, we don't know how many deer there are in this country and that's the real problem I was trying to get over. So these claims are being based off of misrepresented numbers that have just been repeated and accepted as fact. This appears to be a concerted effort to demonize deer to justify their mass culling. This is coupled by a big push to market deer flesh to consumers and there's been successful lobbying efforts to push for government grants to help with increased deer culling under the guise of providing nutritious protein to the public. And where have we heard that before? Meat and dairy naturally contain vitamin B12, which helps us get energy from the food and stay healthy. But let's get back to conservative MP Sir Charles Walker who's behind the big government push based on these questionable numbers. This MP is the chair of the Country Food Trust, a charity which brings meals to the need. Sounds like a very kind thing to do, but when you look on their website, most of their meals contain wild hunted animals, which is strange. Why the heavy focus on deer flesh? If you want to feed people, you just feed them any food. But then, when you look at who the Country Food Trust is supported by, you'll see major gun companies, including Browning, major shotgun cartridge companies, the Barbary Shooting School, the British Association for Shooting and Conservation, and the Countryside Alliance, a lobbying group for hunters who amongst other things fight against hunting bands they essentially campaign for and protect the interests of hunters. And they have of course echoed MP Charles Walker's call for culling more deer. CFT also partnered with people like Chef Mike Robinson who's a hunter and owns a business called Deer Box that sells wild venison. They also claim on their website that they do not lobby for or against shooting. It's illegal sport and there are plenty of people lobbying both ways on the subject. We respect their different views. If they don't lobby for shooting, what on earth is their chair MP Charles doing in parliament? I mean, hunting certainly involves shooting. It's also very interesting that Charles uses this charity as emotional leverage in parliament to help him convince the government to increase the cult. I am chair unpaid of the Country Food Trust. I mean, again, it's very nice to help feed people, but it's very obvious that there's more than just the people in need benefiting from Charles's efforts in parliament. There's an old saying, follow the money. According to the Countryside Alliance, shooters spend in excess of £2.5 billion each year on goods and services and shooting is worth £2 billion to the UK economy. Now that's a lot of money for hunting licences, bullet and gun companies, hunting equipment manufacturers and also the sale of the deer flesh itself. According to the School of Journalism in the 1500s, Henry VIII introduced wild deer to Bushy Park and Greenwich Park, the oldest royal park for the purposes of hunting. A century later, Richmond Park was established for the same purpose. Now deer are regularly being killed in the parks for their meat. 1493 deer have been killed in London's royal parks in annual calls since 2017. The royal parks has earned more than £200,000 from selling the flesh of the slaughtered deer. The writers even called this a glorified farm. If this is true, then killing 750,000 deer could in theory generate a further £100 million in flesh alone. So it seems that killing more deer and marketing deer meat to increase demand will serve the financial interests of the hunting industry and the recreational interests of those who love shooting these majestic wild animals for fun. An oversupply for the moderate size of the existing venison market creates a negative drag on the culling effort. As I mentioned earlier, we're only culling 350,000 when we should be culling a great deal more. Why is there a drag? Because depressed carcass prices mean stalkers can no longer cover their costs and therefore have a reduced incentive to manage deer stocks. So it seems here he's calling for the government to increase the venison market and the need for government funding to help incentivize hunters to increase the cull. I mean, wouldn't hunters just love that? That's what we want. And the government has already agreed with MP Charles in a December 2023 debate about public food procurement, where he sounds the alarm on deer overpopulation again and pushes for hunted deer to be included as a healthy sustainable meat in schools, which culminated with the DEFRA chief Mark Spencer saying, I wholly accept my honorable friend's argument, and it is something we're taking very seriously. DEFRA is working on a deer strategy. I want to see that meat enter the food chain. When we publish the revised GBSF, I encourage members on both sides of the house to support their implementation across the public sector. So what does the GBSF Mark speaks of? Well, it's the government buying standards for food and catering services. It sets the standards for public food procurement in government institutions like the NHS, schools, the army and prisons. Some are even mandatory. So it looks like a very strong push to get deer flesh into these institutions. Four days later, you see an update to how much is paid in deer management grants. And again, to state the obvious, all this deer flesh going into public institutions isn't just going to be given by hunters to the public sector for free. So it appears like hunters will be paid for the flesh with government funds. Therefore, we, the public, are paying for hunting with our taxes. There's something called the perverse incentive. It's where the incentive unintentionally rewards people for making the issue worse. When you have such a large financial incentive for culling deer, you are not incentivising fixing the issue, but rather incentivising the proliferation of the issue. And there's actually a real world example of this, where the US army put a bounty on pig tails to reduce wild pig populations. But the population actually increased due to people feeding the pigs and preferentially shooting the large male pigs over the females and young pigs, which doesn't decrease the population as much, if at all. So the hunting industry welcomes the public perception of an existential crisis of deer over population, because then they can capitalise on it, under the guise of conservation and avoid public outrage for unjustifiably shooting wild animals. But let's stop with the euphemisms and nonsense fairy tales, and let's be clear on what culling 750,000 deer looks like. An absolute massacre. Hunting is brutal and cruel, and these cowards stalk terrified helpless animals and shoot them, often not killing them instantly, which causes further suffering. So they're supposedly already killing 350,000 deer each year, and now they want more blood? It's horrific and rightly opposed by those who truly care about the interests of animals. Moreover, if there is an overpopulation issue, which I'm yet to be convinced of based on the questionable numbers, then we should focus on animal-friendly methods like contraception. Maybe the government should just redirect funding into this method of managing deer, or even better, redirect some of the billions in subsidies they give to the environmentally-destructive meat and dairy industry, especially considering one of the main arguments for culling deer is that they eat trees. Cows and sheep also eat trees, yet we just breed more of them. It's almost like the main goal is not preserving trees, but more profit for farmers and hunters. Look at what happens when you let the land do its thing instead of grazing. In fact, the 48% of UK land currently used for grazing and growing feed for animals used to be all forest. This paper looked at what could happen if we freed up this land and they found that almost all current UK pasture could once again become forest. The proposal also doubled the UK's carbon budget to reach near zero by 2050 in addition to providing more fruits and vegetables and freeing up land to produce crops currently not produced in significant numbers in the UK without affecting protein production. If the government were so concerned with trees, they would oppose the UK meat and dairy industry, which uses the equivalent of a whole other UK in land use overseas. Do you still believe that the hunter's goal is just to protect trees from deer or just to shoot them to satisfy their bloodlust? If we were going to blame any species for destroying ecosystems in the environment, it would be human beings. We utterly wreak havoc on earth to feed our lust for flesh. But no cull proposals in parliament to control human beings. You know why? Because humans have rights and it would be a sick thing to suggest. But when it comes to deer, if they're rights, let's just chase them down and shoot them all. Ironically, if UK deer overpopulation can be proven, hunters could likely be exacerbating it because hunters like to shoot and kill bucks to hang on their wall. The targeting of male deer actually skews the gender ratio, leaving more females for leftover males to mate with, which increases offspring. So maybe to tackle this, the government should just impose a full hunting ban and make cruel blood sports completely illegal and favour more ethical solutions. But instead, the government has proposed loosening hunting bans to open up hunting at night and open seasons across the year to encourage the targeting of males, which is counterproductive to keeping populations down but very favourable to hunters, some of whom are mega rich, with many large estates owned by extremely wealthy hunting enthusiasts where they pump millions of their own money into their favourite pastime with their buddies. I mean, it does make you ask the question, whether there's some kind of corruption going on, especially with so much money involved, it wouldn't surprise me at all. There's also the issue of lead bullets, which studies show contaminate the deer flesh. And the FDA says there's no legal limit for lead and this Australian study showed a detrimental amount of lead dispersed in deer flesh. So this is a serious health risk for children and pregnant women. Will there be warning labels on all deer flesh for consumption marketed to the public? And what about when procuring deer meat to NHS hospitals? I mean, the country food trust does have organisations sign a lead guidance form before buying deer flesh in bulk on their website, but will every individual be adequately worn before they're served deer? Furthermore, in the UK, according to the WWT, more than 7,000 tonnes of lead ammunition is discharged into the environment every year. Between 50,000 and 100,000, wild fowl die in the UK each year as a result of ingesting lead from used bullets. Birds often mistake tiny shot pellets for grit or seeds and eat them. And migratory swans like whoopers and buicks were the worst affected, with lead poisoning accounting for a quarter of deaths. In England and Wales, the law says non-led alternatives must be used when shooting wildfowl and in some wetlands regardless of who you're shooting. While lead shot is prohibited in all wetlands in Northern Ireland and Scotland, despite the law though, WWT's field testing shows the number of birds ingesting lead still isn't decreasing. This could be because many birds feeding fields where lead shot can still be legally used or because some shooters are still using it illegally. Repeated WWT investigations found that around 70% of ducks sold as locally shot in England were illegally shot with lead and this illegal activity has not improved over time. But hunters are just conservationists who love the environment and wild animals, right? Interestingly, MP Charles was even recorded in Parliament opposing the ban of lead bullets and this was in 2015 before he was even part of the country food trust that he now appears to use as a convenient front. Now, what would be his motivation for opposing the use of lead bullets? This only serves the interests of hunters, recreational shooters and gun companies, not the animals or the environment. So very suspicious behaviour in my opinion. Now we can get onto the irrelevance of 750,000 deer a year entering the UK food supply. Even if we assume the 2 million deer and 750,000 need to be culled figures are accurate, a deer has about 31 kilograms of flesh if we're being generous. So if 750,000 are killed annually, which I'm not sure is even possible, that's 23 million kilos of deer flesh or 350 grams per person per year. The average brick consumes about 854 grams of meat a week. This adds not even 1% to the meat consumption of the UK. In addition to this, deer flesh is expensive with even mince being between 14 to 18 pounds per kilo. When you couple that with mince being more likely to be contaminated with lead, it's definitely not the consumer who benefits from any of this, and certainly not the deer. Yet the hunting industry benefits in every way. Now you also hear deer meat is just so full of protein which is just marketing rhetoric similar to the trick the AHDB use in their campaigns. But when you plug deer flesh into chronometer it's about 60% protein which is about the same as TVP or soya chunks, but less than satan which is around 75% protein. So nothing special here. Also deer is a red meat. So likely a 2A carcinogen along with other red meats. Although there's no human data on venison specifically to confirm. But maybe the government should look into this before pushing deer into the NHS to be fed to people recovering in hospitals. So finally just be very skeptical of the recent push to cull deer. There are many forces acting in the background who don't have the animals best interests at heart. Whenever you see this kind of nutritional rhetoric it's probably consumer marketing. Whenever you see marketing someone is financially benefiting from it. Whenever you see someone blowing up a massive problem off of questionable numbers it might just be that they've started with a favorable solution in mind already and worked backwards. And who really suffers because of this? The poor vilified deer who cannot defend themselves. These quote unquote conservation efforts are in my opinion just glorified animal killers using a convenient excuse to continue their cowardly blood sports with impunity. In the form of full government policy support, relaxed hunting laws and now they're pushing for public support, public consumption and therefore public complicity. So please think critically, do not trust the propaganda of animal killers, dig deeper and always as a primary focus make sure the rights of the animals are being truly respected. Thank you for watching, I'll see you all in the next video.