Man arrested for 2x4 labeled "High Powered Rifle"
This may help add some context for UK folks. I visited my parents in Boulder, a city of 100,000 (300,000 including its suburbs) last year. Even within city limits, deer eating people's plants are considered a "pest" and this is a continual problem if you have a garden or a planter box. During the one week I was there, I saw a black bear running through the middle of town; it was a young one so its mother was nearby. On a second evening that week, people coming over for a houseparty reported there was a black bear a block away. This past month, two Boulder Police Officers were discharged from their jobs for poaching a bull elk within city limits while they were on duty. And this is all inside a city.
Multiply this a hundred-fold and you've got rural areas. Two months after my first child was born, we were living in a house outside of Ashland, Oregon. My wife woke up in the middle of the night to breastfeed our baby and saw movement through the sliding glass doors of our bedroom. A mountain lion was chilling on our back porch. There was one flimsy sheet of glass between my wife and a 200-lb killing machine (mountain lions are bad news...way more aggressive than a bear). It eventually sauntered off. I don't even bother to count deer sightings in places like that; they're a daily occurrence.
At my father-in-laws house in eastern Oregon, wild turkey roam his land continually. During my last week-long visit, a visitor dropped by and casually commented that he'd shot a three-foot rattlesnake as he drove down the driveway. This was not an unusual occurrence; my wife had a run-in with another rattler two days later.
We've got a LOT of wild animals here in America.
Edit: and here's a politician riding a moose. Because that's how we roll.