Well, lucky little tiny tots at Top Days nurseries in Hampshire and Dorset. It’s Bambi on the menu for them now that the organisation running the schools has teamed up with the Eat Wild company, which promotes wild meats, to introduce venison into school lunches. They’re rolling out five dishes featuring venison, including deer mince in spaghetti bolognese and burgers. Some 3,000 children will benefit, and there will be more when the scheme is introduced in other schools.
It is the obvious and sane solution to the problem of an ever-increasing deer population, short of introducing wolves to cull the creatures, which nowadays have no natural predators. The children get to eat venison, which is low in fat and rich in nutrients like iron and zinc. The deer have a happy life until they’re shot – and if you had a choice between being a wild deer or a battery chicken, which would you prefer? The meat comes from two estates in the South Downs which are overrun with deer, so the environmental benefits of culling them are huge, specifically for trees, and for biodiversity generally.
There are, according to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, two million deer in Britain, a million more than there should be if we’re to continue to plant trees with a chance of survival at the rate the government promised.
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