The deer of Miyajima

In 2000, Miyajima's deer population became an issue on the island. Having
allowed the number of deer to increase, residents became distressed with deer
breaking into their houses and shops and complained about the mess they made.
Due to demand from residents, local government recently decided to send the
deer back into the mountains and stop them being fed.

Originally, people treated deer as a symbol of Miyajima, as divine messengers of
Itsukushima Shrine. However, after World War II they ate deer because of food
shortages. As a result of that, the number of deer decreased sharply and
subsequently more female deer were brought from Nara for breeding. After that,
people encouraged deer to come from the mountains into the town by feeding
them. The deer then became a prominent feature of Miyajima and became an
added tourist attraction for the island.

Now, the local government are insisting on sending the deer back to the wild and
do not want anyone to feed them. But there is not enough grass in the
mountains for deer. In the island, they stopped selling "shika senbei" last
autumn and there are now signs for tourists which say "Don't feed deer".

The result is that many deer are now starving to death.

We are going to hand in a proposal to Hatsukaichi city hall before the
conference makes their decision at the end of May. The proposal includes the
following:

  + By neutering deer, their population can be controlled humanely.

  + By providing them with food, their behavior and movements can be
controlled.

However, when we told the local government and people in the island about the
proposal, some of them just said that they would rather use any available
funding for maintaing public facilities instead of caring for deer. They don't want
to spend money on deer in any case. But there are some residents who feel
sorry for the deer. Some of them feed the deer secretly, others do it openly.

When we examined the deer recently, we noticed that all of them appeared
emaciated and ill. Their coats were in extremely bad condition and some were
losing their hair. When we fed them they scrambled desperately for the food. We
noticed that fawns and weak deer were not able to compete with stronger deer
for food. We also saw dead deer on the beach. We mentioned the situation to a
resident, but the person said that it is an everyday experience and told us to
leave it alone.