Why Deer Get Shot and Dogs Get Rescued

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Here’s a sentence I keep hearing recently: 

Deer in the UK are “overpopulated,” they’re “invasive,” because they have no natural predators, and hunting them is just responsible management. 

Now imagine someone proposing the same solution for street dogs or cats. Suggest culling them at scale, and you’re a monster.

The thing is that the root problem is the same; species that are overpopulated because of humans, yet the response we have is completely different. 

This has been bugging me for weeks. So I went down a rabbit hole, and here’s what I found.

The stats

The most-cited figure of the UK deer population growth comes from the Forestry Commission and Defra: from roughly 450,000 in the 1970s to about 2 million today. 

Some estimates go as high as 3 million. Other researchers push back hard on the higher numbers, saying they’re inflated to justify more aggressive culling policy.

Either way, deer numbers have increased; this part is true.

Why don’t deer have predators anymore?

We talk about deer “overpopulation” like it’s some accident of nature, when it’s not. Humans caused it, deliberately.

Wolves were the UK’s last big predator, but kings ordered their extermination. Edward I literally ordered every wolf in England to be killed, back in 1281.

Kings paid bounties for wolf kills and handed nobles land on the condition they cleared wolves off it. Add centuries of deforestation wiping out their habitat, and by the 1400s-1500s, wolves were gone from England.

Scotland held out a bit longer; the last confirmed kill was in 1680, with a few occasional sightings into the 1700s.

Bears and lynx went even earlier.

So when people say “there’s no natural predator to control deer,” what they actually mean is: “we killed the predator, on purpose, over hundreds of years, and now we have to keep doing that job ourselves.”

We destroyed the balance, and then we act shocked there’s none.

The damage deer cause

In fairness, deer do cause property damage, for example: 

• £3 million a year in tree damage on Scottish public land alone
• Up to 74,000 deer killed or injured in road collisions annually in the UK
• Deer strip bark and eat tree shoots, which stops woodlands from regenerating naturally

Some conservationists argue culling deer also protects other struggling native species. 

However, I don’t see how that argument changes anything. Killing one animal to protect another doesn’t address the root cause.

Now compare that to street dogs and cats

Globally, there are an estimated 200 million+ stray dogs and 480 million stray cats. 

In Europe alone, that’s over 100 million strays. Romania has 500,000-1,000,000 stray dogs. 

Turkey has around 4 million.

Stray animals cause enormous ecological damage too. 

What street cats do

• Globally linked to at least 63 known species extinctions, and responsible for roughly 14% of all bird, mammal, and reptile extinctions worldwide. Some regional studies put that figure as high as 26%
• Currently threatening 360+ more species that are still hanging on
• In the US alone, cats kill an estimated 1.3-4 billion birds and 6.3-22.3 billion mammals every single year. Unowned, free-roaming cats cause most of that
• They don’t just kill directly; they also outcompete native predators like foxes and skunks for the same prey, because humans subsidize cat populations with food and shelter that wild predators don’t get

What street dogs do

• Linked to 11 species extinctions so far, and a threat to at least 188 more species worldwide
• Compete with wild predators for food. In Poland, free-roaming dogs hunt the same prey that wolves depend on; direct competition with a species already struggling to survive
• Spread rabies and canine distemper to wild animals. For endangered wild dog species, catching either disease can mean local extinction
• Kill endangered species directly, too. Documented cases include wild goats in Pakistan and elephant seals in Mexico
• It’s not just wildlife, either. Rabies from stray dogs kills an estimated 55,000 people a year globally; dogs cause 99% of those deaths

Between predation, disease spread, and out-competing native predators, street cats and dogs are doing comparable (if not worse) ecological damage than deer. 

When you look at the numbers, cats and dogs can be considered the bigger ecological threat, yet nobody’s suggesting we solve it by hunting and eating them.

Why the double standard exists 

One animal gets called a pet or companion. Another gets called a food source. Why? Simply because this is what we decided. 

Possibly it’s also the justification that deer are wild, and nobody “owns” them, so managing their numbers is framed as conservation, not killing.

Street dogs and cats are domesticated species that humans created through selective breeding and then abandoned. So the logic says: we owe them rescue, not a bullet.

And people mean it; I watched this play out back home. In November 2025, a doctor in Sofia deliberately ran over Maya, an elderly community dog the whole neighborhood had cared for and loved for over a decade. 

Security cameras caught it; he hit her, stopped, got out to check if she was under the car, then got back in and ran her over a second time. The video went viral. 

People spray-painted “Murderer” on his garage door. Residents organized protests outside the courthouse and outside the hospital where he worked, demanding he lose his medical license. Prosecutors opened a criminal case that could carry up to 8 years in prison.

That’s the reaction to one dog.

Now compare that to deer. Across the UK, US, and Europe, killing them gets framed as conservation. There’s no backlash, no outrage; various brands and supermarkets are happy to sell venison as “sustainable meat.” Same root cause, and same outcome: a dead animal. Yet, a much different public response.

Here’s my problem with that logic: a deer and a dog feel fear and pain the same way. Neither one asked to be born into an overpopulated world that humans engineered. 

“Wild” versus “domestic” is a line we drew. It’s not a line that exists in how much an animal is capable of suffering.

But the reality is that it is less about the animal and more about us needing a label that lets us care about one and kill the other without sitting with the contradiction.

“But at least it’s humane…”

First, what does “humane” actually mean? The definition is having or showing compassion, and acting to prevent or minimize pain and suffering.

Here’s the problem though: no animal wants to be shot, killed, and butchered. Every animal fights, flees, or freezes the second it senses death coming. It’s the most basic survival instinct there is. 

No animal is okay with being shot, and you simply can’t kill something against its will and call the experience humane.

“Humane killing” is an oxymoron. It is purely for our conscience, and it has nothing to do with what an animal actually experiences.

Now, here’s what “humane” looks like in practice for UK deer culling:

• In UK deer stalking, roughly 11% of deer are wounded rather than killed cleanly with the first shot
• Up to 5% of shot deer escape wounded entirely
• One British study found some wounded deer suffered for more than 15 minutes before dying

An 11% wounding rate isn’t humane, and calling it “management” instead of “killing” doesn’t change what it actually is. If a vet had an 11% failure rate putting down a stray dog, we’d call that malpractice, not mercy. 

Does culling even work the way we’re told it does?

Deer are polygynous, meaning one male can breed many females in a season. 

Killing bucks (male deer) barely touches population growth, because the surviving males just breed more of the does (female deer).

The research backs this up:

• Wildlife biologists confirm that buck survival has a limited effect on population size, since an individual buck can breed with many does. Deer population growth is driven almost entirely by doe survival
• A peer-reviewed model found that killing mostly bucks kept the population high
• Studies show you could kill 70% of the bucks in a herd and the population would barely change
• Removing young bucks specifically has not been shown to reduce future deer populations at all

If bucks are heavily hunted while does are protected, you can end up with fewer males but the same number of pregnancies, because it only takes one healthy buck to breed an entire group of does. 

Skewing a population toward females can actually push births up, not down.

And from my research, I found that hunters mostly want bucks; the males, the ones with the big antlers people show off as trophies.

With that, I don’t mean ‘lets hunt does instead’; I’m saying maybe culling doesn’t do what it’s sold as doing.

So… is there a better solution?

I’m from Bulgaria, and street cats and dogs were a part of the backdrop growing up there.  

Sofia used to handle it with mass killing. From 1999 to 2006, over 70,000 stray dogs were caught, held for two weeks, and killed. The worst part is, it didn’t even work. The numbers on the street barely moved.

Then in 2008, Bulgaria passed a law banning culling as a method entirely, and the city switched to catch-neuter-vaccinate-return instead.

Sofia counted about 11,000 stray dogs in 2007. By 2018, that number had dropped to around 3,600, and it’s kept falling since. The European Parliament recognized it as a best-practice model.

This case is an example of how a non-lethal approach happened at a national scale and it worked.

Nobody had to kill their way there. They just stopped unsterilized breeding at the source, instead of nstead of only managing the output.

For deer, similar non-lethal tools exist; they’re just underused:

• Immunocontraception (vaccines like PZP or GonaCon) stops reproduction without killing anything. A 5-year North Carolina trial found 2 doses cut pregnancy rates by 86% per deer. The science works, but nobody is funding it. 
• Predator reintroduction – lynx, and eventually wolves, doing the job we took away from them centuries ago. Politically difficult, but ecologically an honest fix
• Habitat exclusion and fencing – protecting specific vulnerable woodlands rather than reducing the whole population. It works, but it’s expensive, and it can just push the same browsing pressure onto unprotected land nearby instead of solving anything.

It took Sofia years to get it better and see results. The non-lethal options for deer haven’t had that kind of time yet.

Final thoughts

I also don’t think this is a simple story: humans are villains, and doing nothing isn’t a neutral choice either. But I also don’t think that killing is “the solution” for a deer, a cat, or a dog.

What I keep coming back to is this: we didn’t get here by accident. We killed the wolves, and we bred and abandoned cats and dogs. Humans built both problems over centuries.

Then, we decided that a dog ends up in a shelter, while a deer ends up shot in a field.

None of this was ever the animals’ decision, and I think it is important to sit with that, recognise the hypocrisy, and the excuses we make to feel okay about it.