Bog Myrtle & Peat

Shoot stags to your heart’s content, and dash them to the ground with your bullets. If you do it right, you’ll strike them dumb and they’ll die in all manner of mad, romantic poses. Their tongues will lol from their mouths and their windpipes fold in breath-compressing angles. It’s a blast, so let the hills resound to your gunfire – and if you feel qualms about the slaughter, remember they’re almost vermin now; these highland hosts of clan-defining majesty. Kill them hard and even the greenest ecologist will back you to the hilt.

It’s a rough time for grazing animals in Scotland, and even estates presenting their hard-won culls to Government are being encouraged to kill more and faster. Few other animals can be shot with such impunity, and kids who dream of careers in the countryside are well advised to paper their bedroom walls with posters of argocats and adverts for Remington 700s. As deerstalkers, they’ll be working long after the last shepherd has gone and the grousekeepers are off to quarrywork or driving trucks. 

If we killed deer for pleasure in the past, the rationale is only loving now – they’re shot because we love nature and deer don’t know what’s best for themselves. But when we measure deer against foxes, the comparison is telling – because while we feel anxious about killing foxes, the pragmatism and straightforwardness of deerstalking goes unquestioned in the public eye. We’ve all been schooled to understand that these animals have got to go, and deer management is settling in for the long run. So there’s no thought given to translocation, sterilisation or diversionary feeding as alternative means of deer management. Just get them killed, boys – we’ve more to kill tomorrow.

In a recent review on curlew conservation work, the scientists recognised the value of predator control. It turned out that killing foxes had boosted curlew productivity, but the discussion which followed seemed to express concern that locking into long term fox control programmes might pose moral and ethical issues. Predator control is sometimes presented as a stop-gap, and a short-term measure to boost wader productivity until habitats can be restored to allow a more natural balance. That’s how some people are able to rationalise their engagement with activities they dislike – because it’s not forever. But for deer, the motto is kill them out, and perhaps your reward will be to kill fewer of them in the future.

There will never be a time when deer won’t have to be killed, and the work is underpinned by the knowledge that if landowners fail to deliver a satisfactory level of culling to meet environmental objectives, government agencies will do it on their behalf at then hand them the bill. That sounds extreme, but it’s the reality of wildlife management to deliver priority objectives – there are carrots and sticks in this game. It’s useful to imagine what might happen when the Government provides funding to support a landowner’s attempts to conserve waders by habitat management. If waders don’t respond, it’s fair to ask if the landowner is also carrying out predator control too. And if they aren’t, would it be so unreasonable to make them do it? After all, what’s in the precedent established by deer that isn’t also here?

In the wake of the recent ban on snaring foxes in Scotland, it became clear that killing any animal poses a risk to its welfare standards – it’s incumbent upon the killer to manage that risk. Snaring was deemed to represent an unacceptably high threat to animal welfare, but deer are a useful foil to reveal contradictions on a very sliding scale.

The Scottish Government’s target of culling 50,000 deer each year accommodates the likelihood that around 8% of that number will be injured and lost. That’s four thousand deer that will die days or even weeks later in a horrible state of suffering. Deer stalking is more professional and effective than it has ever been in Scotland, but any drive to improve welfare standards has to be matched against the practical realities of delivering management on the ground. Eggs tend to get broken when omelettes are made; animals are hurt and lost. Those 4,000 deer are never mentioned in discussions about rewilding or reforesting – they’re an inconvenient truth, but they seem to show that we are able to make pragmatic decisions which balance welfare and conservation – we’re just oddly squeamish about certain species.