Ecological value of carcasses
- Thread starter Stayangry
- Start date
It's a good idea to have muck and slurry analysed to ensure that the correct quantities are applied. Over application means that not all of the nitrogen will be taken up by the crop, and the surplus can result in pollution.
How do you meter a muck spreader
Easy enough to measure application rate in tonnes per acre.
It's common practice. I thought you'd have known that.
No but a lot of invertebrates/insects need a rotting carcass and instead of trying to sell a badly shot deer to a game dealer it at least has a value to the ecosystem.
If you shoot a deer and leave it, what about examining it for infectious notifyible diseases? Does that go up the swany and whatever disease left to spread?
I said if it was shot badly but you should still notify a notifyible disease.
Isn’t that why intensive arable farming tends to involve adding a lot of fertiliser?
We’ve known for thousands of years that yield deteriorates if you farm without some mechanism for replenishing the soil nutrients.
The basic logic isn’t really very controversial: if you continuously remove carcasses from an ecosystem, there will be nutrient depletion.
What isn’t clear is whether the amount being removed from Scottish hills is enough to make much difference (ie. Do we really need to worry).
Heym SR20
Well-Known Member
If you consider that all the nutrients that go into a deer come from the soil via the plants that they eat. Remove 20 deer @50 kg per carcass thats 1 tonne of deer carcass coming from the hill. Admittedly quite a bit will be water but all the bones, skin and meat are high in nutrients. And these are all being removed from the system.
Net effect is a negative flow of nutrients.
There will be some nutrients going back as plants grow - they fix nitrogen and CO2 in the plant tissues and take up minerals from the soil. These will be released when the plant dies - either as food for deer, or it dies and rots down releasing its nutrients back into the soil.
If there were trees these would act as a nutrient pump, with their roots going deep down into the soil. They also turn the soil alkali which gives greater access to nutrients.
But the upland soils are nutrient poor. The old mechanism of supplying nutrients is long gone - especially as no longer farmed with seaweed being burnt etc.
The uplands and bogs are so poor in nutrients that many plants are carnivorous - catching and digesting insects to give them what they need.
Thats not to say the soils cannot be fertile again. If you drive up through Caithness you will a poor state of grazing on the crofting lands, especially those that are abandoned, yet just over the fence line is good arable land that has been under good management growing good crops. However the farmland will replace the nutrients as they are removed through natural or artificial fertilisers. In natural systems you will use green manures- plants grown specifically to be ploughed in to decay and release their nutrients.
Remember that Scotland, high rainfall results in continuous leaching of nutrients from the soils. Any nutrients that are released as plants decay are just washed away before they can be taken up in new growth.
The principal reason that many planted trees never get away is that they are being planted in poor soils. If they are being planted on previous forestry, then removal of the previous crop will have also removed all the nutrients.
But plant them on some nutrient rich soil fertilised with a very rich animal based organic fertiliser (blood and bone meal) they get a good strong start and will grow into healthy plants.
In Scotland there are minimal systems returning nutrients- a bit of sea eagle poo perhaps. Insects flying from outwith the area that are then caught by carnivorous plants will add a little. Animals such as deer if allowed to move freely will transport nutrients from lowlands back to the uplands. Going down into the valleys and beaches to eat grass, kelp etc and then going up the hill and pooing helps somewhat.
But we are increasingly using fences to stop such activity.
The beauty of leaving a carcass to rot away is that it will be a concentrated pool of nutrients which will allow something to grow. Animal materials, especially bone, also take lengthy time to decay, so provide a slow release of nutrients back into the system.
Last october I shot a stag in Argyle. It was coming out of an Oak wood. Its stomach was full of acorns. I did push a few into the ground and I would like to think that a future generation may witness a large oak tree growing where that deer had died. It certainly would have had a head start from decomposing bits of the deer that I left behind.
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Heym SR20
Well-Known Member
Or put it another way. Deer, antelope, cattle, sheep etc are a pretty good way of taking lots of low quality plant based nutrients into a concentrated form. An ungulate will spend most of its waking hours eating. It has to do this so to be able to process a high volume of plant matter through its rumen and gut to allow it to grow. If you think of the size of the rumen and how much vegetable it contains, depending on the species most material will go through in a day or less. That’s a lot of blades of grass or leaves.
Carnivores such as man on the other hand probably only need to eat once a day on a piece of deer with a few berries and vegetables for additional vitamins and nutrients. We can probably enough nutrition into our mouths in a few minutes leaving us huge amounts of time to do a whole host other things such as invent the internet and write crap on SD. Deer on other hand have never had spare time - they just have to eat to get enough nutrition ti grow, survive and reproduce. But they do a very efficient job at concentrating those nutrients into a convenient package. And can do so on poor land, with poor quality grazing provided they can access enough volume.
Very roughly about 25% of liveweight is meat that we can eat, the rest is the internal organs, skeleton and skin.
Many of the soils in our upland areas are poor, and lacking nutrients for anything like decent plant growth. If we want to re establish shrubs trees and other plants to develop diversity then we need to provide islands of nutrition for those plants to flourish.
Current system is leave the gralloch and blood, but rest of carcass is extracted. The nutrients in the meat ultimately end up in the public sewer, then into our rivers and then washed out to sea.
The bones and skins and other waste may up be rendered to fertiliser which will end up on farmland. Or the may just go to land fill. Either directly, or via petfood and then in little plastic bags of dog turd.
And do all of the above requires lots of sweat toil and energy.
Meanwhile Nature Scot and others who are trying to rewild things are spending a huge amount of time growing baby trees in nurseries, transporting those trees out to the hills, along with fertilisers to help them establish in the poor soils. If they don’t use some form of nutrition the trees never really get going and die if there is too much rain, sun or pests. All this activity again uses huge amounts more energy and money.
Yes venison is valuable food stuff, but does it really make sense spending 3 hours of argocat time and fuel trying to extract a couple of scruffy hinds, and then starting them on few hundreds of miles journey. And then to lug a 25kg bag of blood and bone meal back to the same spot, so as to get other plant growth. Probably not.
Even in forests and woodlands, does it really make sense to spend all that energy extracting the whole carcass. By all means take the meat. But the bones, skin and gralloch - dump them in amongst natures natural baby tree guards - the brambles, nettles and gorse. Their nutrients will back into the soil and young trees etc will grow that much stronger.
Carnivores such as man on the other hand probably only need to eat once a day on a piece of deer with a few berries and vegetables for additional vitamins and nutrients. We can probably enough nutrition into our mouths in a few minutes leaving us huge amounts of time to do a whole host other things such as invent the internet and write crap on SD. Deer on other hand have never had spare time - they just have to eat to get enough nutrition ti grow, survive and reproduce. But they do a very efficient job at concentrating those nutrients into a convenient package. And can do so on poor land, with poor quality grazing provided they can access enough volume.
Very roughly about 25% of liveweight is meat that we can eat, the rest is the internal organs, skeleton and skin.
Many of the soils in our upland areas are poor, and lacking nutrients for anything like decent plant growth. If we want to re establish shrubs trees and other plants to develop diversity then we need to provide islands of nutrition for those plants to flourish.
Current system is leave the gralloch and blood, but rest of carcass is extracted. The nutrients in the meat ultimately end up in the public sewer, then into our rivers and then washed out to sea.
The bones and skins and other waste may up be rendered to fertiliser which will end up on farmland. Or the may just go to land fill. Either directly, or via petfood and then in little plastic bags of dog turd.
And do all of the above requires lots of sweat toil and energy.
Meanwhile Nature Scot and others who are trying to rewild things are spending a huge amount of time growing baby trees in nurseries, transporting those trees out to the hills, along with fertilisers to help them establish in the poor soils. If they don’t use some form of nutrition the trees never really get going and die if there is too much rain, sun or pests. All this activity again uses huge amounts more energy and money.
Yes venison is valuable food stuff, but does it really make sense spending 3 hours of argocat time and fuel trying to extract a couple of scruffy hinds, and then starting them on few hundreds of miles journey. And then to lug a 25kg bag of blood and bone meal back to the same spot, so as to get other plant growth. Probably not.
Even in forests and woodlands, does it really make sense to spend all that energy extracting the whole carcass. By all means take the meat. But the bones, skin and gralloch - dump them in amongst natures natural baby tree guards - the brambles, nettles and gorse. Their nutrients will back into the soil and young trees etc will grow that much stronger.
Other than with extreme infections, how would you identify bTB in a carcass without performing a gralloch? Or do we think the idea would be to still inspect every carcass, even if it will be left to decompose?
Perhaps stink pits will also see a resurgence, so shot animals can be removed from the public’s gaze?
I was being diplomatic.
I think it’s very likely that removing the number of carcasses that we do is depleting soil nutrients in many Scottish upland ecosystems. They’re very nutrient poor to start with.
I have no problem at all with shooting and leaving the carcasses. Makes perfect ecological sense in many areas. Also makes economic sense as well.
People get their knickers in a twist because it’s not how it’s been done historically and because we have an intuitive sense that it’s ‘wasting’ food.
David Barker
Well-Known Member
Its a rock and a hard place if we remove venison from the hill and eat it then we are not eating other meat that is normally less environmentally friendly. By removing lots of deer we are stopping the nock on effect that is to many deer. I would not like to see good quality venison left while many will be eating burgers full of crap.
I agree, this argument has never made sense to me. If it made sense to “do it because we’ve always done it” then we would still be swinging from the trees in the Rift Valley. Our adaptation to an environment is our key to success.
So a few times we’ve had this depleted Scottish upland ecosystem being quoted.
Maybe let’s just imagine that the reds might just have a wander of an evening from the barren, scoured heather clad hills in the gloaming down to the cultivated, fertilised fields of maybe kale or barley or neeps for a feed. Fill their boots and then wander back to those barren, scoured, depleted, iconic peaks to get away from those iconic bloody midgies.
So you have an armed wander across the magnificent landscape and shoot one, on the upper slopes of said hills.
Do you leave it where it is, and risk supernutriation of a naturally barren habitat? Do you drag it down and leave it to rot in the fields (maybe ask the farmer first)? Do you work out the proportion of heather and lichen graze and barley and neep tops and leave bits scattered around according to what’s been eaten and where - maybe a few poorer cuts on the hill and the fillets strewn about the kale and barley? Chuck a couple of legs now and again into the conifers?
If I’m going to do this, I’m going to want to do this right. Keep me on the side of the angels here people. How do we make sure the correction of this imbalance is 100% returning the nutrients back to the right parts of the landscape in the right proportions?
Maybe let’s just imagine that the reds might just have a wander of an evening from the barren, scoured heather clad hills in the gloaming down to the cultivated, fertilised fields of maybe kale or barley or neeps for a feed. Fill their boots and then wander back to those barren, scoured, depleted, iconic peaks to get away from those iconic bloody midgies.
So you have an armed wander across the magnificent landscape and shoot one, on the upper slopes of said hills.
Do you leave it where it is, and risk supernutriation of a naturally barren habitat? Do you drag it down and leave it to rot in the fields (maybe ask the farmer first)? Do you work out the proportion of heather and lichen graze and barley and neep tops and leave bits scattered around according to what’s been eaten and where - maybe a few poorer cuts on the hill and the fillets strewn about the kale and barley? Chuck a couple of legs now and again into the conifers?
If I’m going to do this, I’m going to want to do this right. Keep me on the side of the angels here people. How do we make sure the correction of this imbalance is 100% returning the nutrients back to the right parts of the landscape in the right proportions?
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David Barker
Well-Known Member
The answer would be let them die of natural causes and everything is sorted. Same with the wheat and the tatties leave them rot in the fields and then all is great. We might die of starvation but hey
Heym SR20
Well-Known Member
Like all things, there is no right, nor indeed wrong answer. Deer that are wandering down to feed on the foreshore are in part then taking nutrients back up the mountains.
Shooting fit healthy deer in good condition should go into the human food chain. Managing the herd properly so that you have a sustainable crop is good for everyone, and frankly overall much better than eating industrial produced crap fed on soya produced in cut down rain forests. And shooting those deer in places where they can be easily recovered makes sense.
But equally it makes little sense to try and recover that old hind, or the weak skinny yearling, especially when you have to drag it over a couple of munros. Nor do I see any issue in the American way of recovering the meat but the leaving the rest where it is for nature.
It is a question of finding the balance.
Just leaving deer to die naturally will result in too many deer, non of which will get a proper level of nutrition, they will all be in poor condition and so will the ecosystem, especially if they are fenced in or out of other areas. There will then a mass die off in the next cold spell or dry spell.
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