Scotland’s publicly-funded forestry bodies have spent more than £134m controlling deer over the last decade, The Ferret can reveal.
The country’s’s deer population is estimated to have reached more than one million, having doubled since the 1990s. In high concentrations, deer can cause numerous issues.
They include the deaths of an estimated 700 people in vehicle collisions in the UK every year, the environmental harm caused by trampling and overgrazing, poor animal welfare due to insufficient food and shelter for deer in winter, and steep economic costs.
Don’t you have hunters there? Just give them permission to shoot deer and problem is solved for free. Well, not entirely for free. Some counting should be done to keep deer population in adequate quantities and avoid overhunting. But those would be thousands, not millions.
They’re animals in an imbalanced ecosystem. Rewilding and reintroducing predators could reduce or negate the need for culling.
We have deer stalkers. This article summarises the process of becoming one.