A plan by the Gelderland wildlife management authority FBE to licence hunters to shoot some 3,700 red and fallow deer and over 8,000 boar in the Veluwe heathlands during the upcoming hunting season has been fiercely criticised.

The FBE justifies the cull by saying the current numbers are ‘not in line with management goals’. The organisation wants to reduce the deer population to around 1,600 and the number of boar to some 1,350 within a few years. If this does not happen biodiversity and new plant life will suffer, the FBE said.

However, according to environmental organisation Faunabescherming and animal protection party PvdD, the FBE is bowing to the interests of the hunting fraternity, three members of which are on the FBE board.

‘It’s madness every year but this time this figures are crazier still,’ Harry Voss of the PvdD told local broadcaster Omroep Gelderland. ‘Besides, there are wolves, and a wolf will easily eat a hundred young boar. The population will go down by itself, for instance through a combination of a lack of food, a harsh winter and a cold spring with lots of rain. Some years we see more boar, that’s how it is.’

The FBE said that the presence of 15 to 20 wolves will not have much of an effect on the boar population.

Faunabescherming spokesman Harm Niesen said that the FBE ‘ is nice to hunters because they are paying a lot of money for the hunt.’

Boar, beavers, deer, geese – the Netherlands is in for the cull

In addition, the argument that a cull is needed to reduce CO2 is ‘farfetched and a total nonsense’ Niesen told the broadcaster. ‘There are big mammals everywhere, like the Scottish cows. They can eat whatever they like but apparently deer can’t. There is no need for people to interfere with populations. If there is no food, animals move on. If they can’t adapt, they die.’