A visitor feeding Nara deer. (Image via: MATCHA)

Fed with Plastics, 6 Nara Deer Found Dead

NARA - It is both harrowing and outrageous. While visiting Nara is not complete without feeding the famous Nara deer, it is inhumane to pull a disgusting prank at the lovely deer. Nara deer are known to gather around temples in Nara. They feed on shika senbei, a crackers specially made for these deer. However, since environmental care is getting worsened, some people try to test the deer’s might. How? By feeding them plastics.

Nearby the Todaiji Temple, Nara, a 17 week old doe was found terribly famished, and when she was offered a senbei, she refused to have even a slight bite. Allegedly, the tourists that visit the temple feed her with other food than the crackers, according to a report by Nara Deer Welfare Association.

Added in the report, the 17 week old doe was weighed 17 kilograms, less than 10 kilograms from the standard weight set for these deer.

Last November, also a deer found dead with plastics in their digestive organs. By March 2019, the statistics tabulated that about 8 deer died, and 6 of which died with plastics in their stomach. The largest bundle of plastics found in their stomach weighed about 4.3 kg! That just showed the insidious amount of plastics that the deer had before it gave in.

As other herbivores, deer ruminates its food. It is a complicated process for food to enter one of 4 stomachs called rumen, and the food is processed by bacteria before being regurgitated for the deer to be chewed. This applies to plants and other edible things.

However, plastics are unfriendly and inedible, since they are not food basically. If they take tens to hundreds of years to decompose, of course deer’s digestive system is unable to process plastics; hence they are sick and malnourished by it, leading to gruesome death.

Japanese and other tourists need to pay careful attention to the signs put by Nara’s committee to be careful while feeding the deer. Indeed, the tourists are humane enough to know that deer cannot eat plastics. Nonetheless, some sightings showed that the tourists put the food inside plastic bags for the deer to eat. Deer cannot differ between plastics and food, so it eats both. That is a plausible cause.

The only solution to put an end to the problem is simple: abandon plastic bags, and be mindful to take away plastics from the deer’s surroundings.

Source: https://japantoday.com/category/national/6-Nara-deer-deaths-attributed-to-plastic-in-stomachs-tourists-cautioned-to-feed-animals-properly