Chapter Text
DEERMATH, THE SAGA
Bisexuality Squiddicus; JSYK I’ve just done the maths and if the 5k deer are culled and distributed to KL, if they’re all red deer, that’s approximately nearly 2kg of meat for every citizen in the city
Systlin; Holy goddamn hell
Systlin; Platonically kissing you rn
Bisexuality Squiddicus; The ecology must be on its fucking KNEES
(Several messages later)
Bisexuality Squiddicus; How big is the Kingswood btw
Systlin; Hundreds of square miles, Squid (attached; official map picture of Westeros with scale mile marker)
(CHAT DESCENDS INTO SCREAMING. CALCULATORS COME OUT. CHAT SCREAMS MORE)
CALCULATIONS
Starting grounds; no major culls in 10+ years. Mild winters with little die off. Temperate rainforest climate. Kingswood is 200 miles across in two directions.
1 square mile = 2.59 square kilometers
Sustainable density of red deer in a forest; roughly 10 per square kilometer. Initial goal; 5 per square kilometer, to let environment recover.
Likely density of red deer lacking culls and considering unchecked breeding and a fertile habitat; 30 per sq. km
Kingswood, 200 miles on a side; roughly 40,000 square miles, or 103,600 sq km. Canonically very very lightly populated, mostly at the edges, and kept as a royal hunting preserve.
103,600 times 30 = 3.1 Million deer
(some debate here about if deer per sq km should be set higher at 60 to match some parts of Scotland or not. A note is made that at 45 per sq km, halfway between 30 and 60, this would be 4.7 million deer. It is eventually decided that given the richness of the habitat fuckit let’s go with 65 deer per sq km, or 9,324,000 deer.)
Healthy carrying capacity; roughly 500,000
Excess red deer population in the kingswood; roughly 8,800,000
Red deer; 350 to 550 pounds. Dressed out to only muscle meat, a large stag can yield 220 pounds of meat. Underfed, we assume an average of 100 pounds of muscle meat per deer, plus bones for soup and organs.
Total muscle meat yield; 880 million pounds, or 440,000 tons.
Total organ meat yield; about the same
Total yield of workable bone, antler, and hide; who the fuck even knows, man
Boar density; in parts of Texas wild hog density approaches 16 per square mile. Agreed to assume 12 per square mile for the kingswood, a richer habitat, to be conservative. Texas also carries heavy deer population. Healthy wild boar population; between 2 and 4 per square mile. We split the difference and go with 3.
480,000 total wild boar, conservative estimate. Healthy carrying capacity, 120,000.
Excess wild boar population; 360,000
Wild boar size; 250-600 lbs. We assume smaller and underfed and an average of 250 lbs per boar. Meat per boar; 80 pounds dressed muscle meat. Perhaps 75 pounds of organs. 15 pounds of lard.
Total; 28 million pounds of pork muscle meat, or 14,000 tons. Same again for organ meat. 5 million pounds of lard, or 2,500 tons.
Chat; SCREAMING
Research on meat preservation; FEVERISH
Hides; EVERYWHERE
Skulls; STACKS
Deer; BE FUCKIN’
Long Night; SURVIVED
Later calculations realize that this has not taken into consideration the fact that more deer and boar will continue to be born. Total necessary cull numbers could climb to 15+ million for deer, and a million plus for boar. We didn’t even count the elk and forest bison, which canonically exist.
It is also noted that we have underestimated the size of the kingswood by about 20,000 square miles when better screens than phones are used. Possibly by like 39,000 square miles but we err on the lower end. This pushes initial deer numbers to 10,100,000 deer, with a minimum of nine million needing to be culled, and up to twenty million over time to get the population healthy again. It is generally agreed that this is Fuckoff amounts of meat and that everyone is gonna be wearing a lot of leather.