Red Deer (it’s called Meral in Persian) is one of the indigenous species that lives in the heart of the hyrcanian Forests wild life, in the north of Iran, with long legs and soaring horns.
According to the animal population census in the late 1950s more than 2000 merals lived in Golestan national park but this number has decreased to about 200 in the early 1990s.
Though Golestan National Park is 650 hectares but only 2 hectares of this area is at the disposal of merals, there are destroyed fences which makes it easy for merals to scape from the protected area and eventually get hunted. unsuitable watering holes and an area full of broken dried tree branches which shows the inappropriateness of the environment for keeping this precious species result in losing roughly 7 to 10 merals every year, due to different diseases and malnutrition, also these beautiful creatures are in serious danger of encountering the hunters every day and sadly some of them are being smuggled.
The reduction and extinction of the population of these animals can be catastrophic, because they form an important ring of the food chain and they are considered a vital prey for the Persian brown bears (jungle bears).
The first thing that we can do to stop to stop their extinction is to educate people about these remarkable species and their environment and teach them how to protect them.
I believe the only way that can make people to do something about is to aware them about the impact that the extinction of this species can have on their life, plus the fact that our children could never see these extraordinary animals in future is regretful.
People should know that we are running out of time and every minute that passes make it harder to help nature to heal. the government should pay more attention to merals environment.