We may need to try this along Route 252 through Valley Forge. Lion Dung on Train Tracks Keeps Deer Safe:
Railway officials in Wakayama, a largely rural prefecture in western Japan, racked their brains for months for a way to keep wild deer from running onto train tracks and getting killed.Finally, inspiration struck: scare them off with lion dung.
Taking hints from research by forestry experts, who found that deer shunned the aroma of the king of beasts, officials at the local branch of West Japan Railway Co (JR West) got the material they needed from a local amusement park.
‘I forget how much, but it was a whole lot. I think about 100 kg (220 lb),’ Takao Maeda of JR West in Shingu, some 450 km (280 miles) west of Tokyo, said on Wednesday.
‘They sort of mixed it with water and then spread it along the tracks.’
The strategy appears to have worked for now.For along a 400 meter (1,300 ft) stretch of tracks where a number of deer were struck last year — the Asahi Shimbun newspaper said 30 between January and October — none have been hit since the dung was spread last November.
As far as I know, lions are not indigenous to Japan — but Japanese deer still know to steer clear or them. As well as the lion dung works as a deer repellent, it has its downside:
“The odor is really, really foul,” he said. “So we can only use it on tracks in uninhabited areas.”
Probably not a good choice for Valley Forge…