🦌 Japan killed 1,381,700 deer and wild boar in the year to March 2025. The awkward part comes afterwards. Under Japanese law, a culled animal carried down off the mountain is general waste, and the bill for burning or burying it lands on a rural town hall. Japan has expanded the machinery for killing wildlife faster than the machinery for getting rid of it.

Only the intake got bigger

Environment Ministry preliminary figures put the fiscal 2024 take at 738,700 deer and 643,000 wild boar.

The breakdown matters more than the total. Of the deer, 133,800 were shot by licensed hunters during the sport season. The other 604,900 were taken under damage-prevention or population-management permits. Boar splits the same way: 92,600 in the sport season, 550,400 on permits. Across both species, about 84 percent of the kill is not hunting in the sense the word carries in Montana or the Scottish Highlands. It is pest control delivered as a public service, largely by ageing volunteers working to a municipal contract.

That one ratio decides what happens to the body. A hunter who shoots a deer takes it home. A pest-control operator who shoots a deer has produced a problem. The meat was never the point.

Checking the 50,000-tonne math

The figure that started this discussion comes from Atsuo Tanaka, a forestry journalist who argued on September 9, 2026 that Japan now generates more than 50,000 tonnes of culled-animal carcasses a year and can no longer deal with them. He got there by assigning deliberately low weights to each species: 30 kg for a deer, 40 kg for a boar, 60 kg for a bear.

Apply his weights to the official capture numbers and deer and boar alone come to roughly 47,900 tonnes. Add bears, monkeys, masked palm civets, raccoons and the rest, and 50,000 is a floor rather than a headline. A large boar can exceed 100 kg, and Tanaka is candid that his arithmetic is crude.

The exit is an incinerator, not a kitchen

The comfortable answer is to eat the problem. Japan has pushed this hard, under the French-derived label gibier, and the numbers do not cooperate.

In fiscal 2024, licensed processors handled 127,513 deer and 40,247 boar, and reported 2,678 tonnes of game meat, down from 2,729 tonnes the year before despite the facility count rising from 772 to 826. That is about 12 percent of the animals killed, and 5.6 percent of their weight. The Agriculture Ministry's definition folds other species and pet food into that tonnage, so the share of deer and boar reaching a human plate is lower still. Even hitting the government target of 4,000 tonnes by fiscal 2029 would leave more than nine-tenths of the mass to be disposed of.

The arithmetic is not fixable by enthusiasm. Edible meat is under 30 percent of body weight even in a clean kill, and a game carcass must reach a certified facility quickly, chilled, undamaged, with no gut spillage. A boar caught in a trap on a Tuesday afternoon three ridges from a road fails those conditions before anyone has decided whether to bother.

"Cut it small enough to fit a garbage bag"

Iwaki, in Fukushima Prefecture, pays 12,000 yen (about $78) for a wild boar taken under permit. To collect, the hunter must deliver the animal to one of two city sanitation centres for incineration, cut down small enough to fit a 15 to 45 litre refuse sack, with the head and tail still identifiable so staff can verify it was one animal. That is the job the bounty is really buying: butchery for the furnace, not for the table.

Where there is no furnace, there is a shovel. A 2016 survey of 1,156 municipalities, compiled in a disposal guidebook the National Institute for Environmental Studies revised in June 2024, found burial accounted for about 70 percent of disposal and incineration about 30 percent, with rendering and biological treatment in the low single digits. That breakdown covers the animals municipalities actually disposed of; whatever never came down off the mountain is not in it. The guidebook says the opposite should happen: carry the carcass out, and bury only where removal is impossible and the ecological impact minimal, partly because shallow graves get dug up and lead shot passes into whatever does the digging.

Building the alternative is expensive for the tonnage it buys. Tottori's volume-reduction plant, which uses microbes to break down carcasses, cost 105.7 million yen (about $690,000) to fit out and runs at about 17.39 million yen (roughly $113,000) a year to process around 240 kg a day. The state is not absent here: 51.85 million yen of that build cost came from the national wildlife-damage grant. But a grant buys a building, not the hands to carry 1.38 million animals off a mountain or the furnace hours to burn them. A shared regional facility in Kyoto Prefecture's Chutan district cost 380 million yen (about $2.5 million). Takeo, in Saga, simply charges for intake: 4,000 yen (about $26) an adult, 1,000 yen a juvenile.

None of this is a new discovery. When the Environment Ministry surveyed prefectures back in fiscal 2010, they already reported the same three walls: nowhere to bury, too much labour to bury, and incinerators blocked by construction costs and by neighbours who did not want one nearby.

What stays on the mountain feeds the next bear

From here on, nobody has good data. Because bounties rarely cover the cost of extraction, Tanaka writes, a substantial share of culled animals is simply left where it fell, and some licence holders quit the work because the aftermath, not the shooting, is what they cannot stand.

Japan is not unusual in leaving carcasses out. The USDA's own wildlife-damage manual lists field disposal first among ten methods and states plainly that "WS leaves most carcasses in the field since most animals killed in WDM are taken individually or in small numbers." The difference is scale and intent: American federal wildlife damage work generates an average of 9,288 tons of carcasses a year, and treats leaving them as normal policy. Japan generates roughly five times that, and its own guidance treats leaving them as the exception.

The consequence being raised now is a feedback loop. Tanaka argues that abandoned deer and boar may be feeding bears high-calorie meat they would not otherwise get, and that some bears have learned to come toward the sound of gunfire. Whether that is driving the current crisis is unproven, but the crisis is real: on the Environment Ministry's provisional count, fiscal 2025 brought 50,776 bear sightings and 238 people injured, 13 of them fatally, all records in the ministry's series. If the response is to cull harder, the response also produces more carcasses, in the same forests, for the same bears.

Countries that designed an exit, and one that didn't

Scotland offers the closest useful comparison, because it has the same problem and a different plumbing system. NatureScot put the recorded annual cull at over 100,000 deer as of April 2025, with the real figure estimated near 200,000. The government's deer working group reported in 2020 that this yielded about 3,500 tonnes of venison a year, handled by 178 licensed venison dealers as of early 2018. Scotland kills on the order of a tenth of what Japan kills and moves a comparable or larger tonnage of meat, because the carcass enters a commercial chain the moment it dies: stalkers gralloch in the field, deliver to a larder, and sell on to a dealer. This is not a cheap system either. Public bodies spent at least £135 million on deer management over a decade. But the spending buys a supply chain, not just a body count.

The United States runs on a third model, in which the food channel is the hunters themselves. The same federal manual that shrugs at field disposal estimates recreational harvest at around 652,571 tons a year, and charitable programmes route more than 2 million pounds of donated venison to food banks annually. When most animals are killed by people who want to eat them, disposal is a rounding error.

Japan's problem is structurally different: it turned wildlife control into a public works programme, funded the trigger everywhere and the exit only where a town applied, and left the tailgate, the freezer and the hole in the ground to whoever was standing closest. That is also why the Hokkaido deer that keep multiplying under record culls are only half the story.

The question is not whether to cull, but who carries the animal down the hill and who pays for what happens next. In your country, does a culled animal end up in a food chain, or in a waste stream?

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