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