The numbers are astounding. Of Japan’s 105,000 registered hunters, a mere 1,169 are female. That’s 1.1 percent of all who hunt. Yet those women are heading afield with a focus of helping the environment and filling their freezers.
Japan’s ministry of environment reports the deer population skyrocketed from less than 400,000 in the late 1990s to more than 3 million today. And the boar population doubled to one million over the same time period.
“We’ve tried methods such as building fences or chasing animals away to minimize their deaths, but it wasn’t enough,” Kazuhiro Akiba, head of the ministry’s Wildlife Management Office in Tokyo, told Reuters.
He also said hunting is necessary to “keep the numbers under control to maintain a healthy ecosystem.”
Hunting groups and local governments are trying to recruit women through social media, as well as offering hunting tours and classroom training.
(Photo source: Thomas Peter/Reuters)