Conventional wisdom has it that suburban development takes away habitat from deer, forcing them to treat our yards as drive-throughs. The reality is that suburban sprawl creates better deer habitat than a feral forest can. Despite an estimated 1. With our pampered gardens for their dining rooms, deer find richer foods than whatever once grew on the wild plots swallowed by suburbia.
Gorging like gourmands on 7 pounds of plant matter a day, a doe that might normally drop one fawn a year now often gives birth to twins or triplets. More buildings and cars also mean fewer predators, whether with two legs or four. Venison is increasingly regarded as a healthy, sustainable and readily available alternative to other types of red meat. The British Deer Society, which promotes deer management, argues that culling should be carried out humanely and only where there are problems.
It has to be done humanely. This article is more than 9 months old. Conservationists and game chefs fear too few deer are being culled to keep herds sustainable. Reuse this content. SNH does not routinely publish this data. However, SNH has used it, for example, in a graph in its report to the Scottish Government which illustrated the relative cull levels of red and roe deer on open range and in woodland between and However, the percentages in Figure 13 illustrate a range of points about the national cull.
They show, for example, that only a small proportion of the culls are on agricultural land, although there is a noticeably higher proportion for fallow.
The majority of deer are shot in woodland environments and the proportion would be significantly higher if the table was analysing the actual total cull, rather than just the numbers recorded in cull returns. There is a long historical sequence of detailed information and analysis of the size of the population of red deer living on open hill range in the Highlands, but there appears to be limited information on red deer in the rest of Scotland and the other three species generally.
While roe deer are now established across more or less the whole of mainland Scotland, the impression from the evidence available is that red, sika and fallow are continuing to expand their range in a significant number of areas of the country. While SNH considers the overall population of red deer on open hill range in the Highlands to be no longer increasing, the evidence available suggests that the overall deer populations elsewhere in Scotland continue to increase due to more habitat availability, expanding range and climate change.
The only data that SNH publishes on national cull statistics was shown in Figure 8 , while the Group has included Figures 11 and 13 to illustrate that SNH has other information about the national culls than its current simple table.
SNH could be publishing such information as part of providing a clearer picture of the position. That is considered further later in Part Six of this Report. However, it is now 60 years since the Act first introduced a statutory framework to regulate deer hunting rights to protect public interests. While that framework has evolved into the Act as amended, it is clear that there have also been major increases over that time in the distributions and numbers of wild deer in Scotland.
This Report considers whether that regulatory framework and associated non-statutory arrangements are delivering the public policy aim of effective deer management that safeguards public interests and promotes sustainable deer management. Hunting and Hunting Reserves in Medieval Scotland.
John Donald, Edinburgh. Rural Forum, Scotland. BSP, London. The influence of man on animal life in Scotland. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Mammal Review , 17 1 , The Scottish Environment — Statistics. Government Statistical Service, Edinburgh. Expanding ranges of wild and feral deer in Great Britain.
Mammal Review , 35 2 , How many deer are there in Britain and are numbers really increasing? Methods for control of wild deer appropriate for use in the urban environment in England. Dog attacks on deer. Feeding deer.
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