It was green and pretty worn from time to time, because as a child I leafed through it again and again: a Bambi picture book based on the cartoon of the same name. The deer with its large bulging eyes is an early imprint of my life. And then the shock when I read the original story by Felix Salten (1869-1945): On the one hand, this is not SUCH a gullible animal, but a REAL Bambi, on the other hand, the story is much more cruel than in the Disney softener. movie.
“By far the most famous deer in the history of literature is a goat named Bambi,” writes journalist Rudolf Neumeier (51) in his recently published book “about the legendary animal.” The former columnist for the Süddeutsche Zeitung and current managing director of the Bavarian State Association for the Protection of the Homeland in Munich views the deer from a biological, historical and artistic point of view, and also describes it as a political issue.
“Everyone loves Bambi. All? Not really,” Neumeier writes. For forestry economists and hunting license holders who think in terms of forest economics, treat deer as vermin, and join forces in a so-called ecological hunting club, Bambi is as annoying as a tick. “Are deer the new bark beetles?” was the name of the symposium even for the priest of the forest, forester and best-selling author Peter Wollleben (58). And indeed, you read again and again how deer attack young trees.
Of course, Neumeier sees it differently. He is a hunter himself. “Yes, I kill deer,” he writes. “I eat them, and before that I offer them a bullet.” Neumeier loves deer, loves to eat them, but would never call them pests. And this is not the case, according to the latest Bavarian vegetation report: according to this, the proportion of plants with fresh leading shoot wilt is 2 percent for spruce, 11 for fir, 5 for pine, 16 for beech and 25 for oak. Neumeier: “This means, for example, that 98 percent of the spruces grow as whole (…) as 75 percent of the oaks.”
And yet the shooting of deer is increasing every year. “In fact, the foresters screwed up the forest at some point,” Neumeier writes. “They grew monocultures.” Spruce, spruce, spruce. At the latest, Storm Lothar on St. Stephen’s Day in 1999 showed us that things were not so good: trees fell like dominoes, entire forests lay flat. How do foresters do it? “It’s better to say nothing about old mistakes and nothing about murder,” Neumeier writes. It is better to tell them that deer are better off when there are fewer of them.
But Neumeier continues: “Killing more and more deer every year is definitely not the solution.” If the rangers understood that the forest is not a cornfield, and if they also communicated this to the rangers, the deer would have significantly less hunting stress.
Rudolf Neumeier, “Deer – about a legendary animal”, Hanser