Highland estates clash with nature campaigners over wild deer culls

It takes five hours traversing ridges and rough heather — battling swarms of midges in the morning and torrential afternoon rain — for Duncan to fire an easy shot at his unaware quarry, an ageing red deer stag.

In the shadow of Perthshire’s Schiehallion mountain, he bleeds the 65kg “beast”, its entrails left for ravens and raptors. He then drags the carcass down the hill, where an all-terrain vehicle provides a bone-crunching ride back to the larder.

“People ask me why I shoot deer,” said the 29-year-old stalker for a local estate. “What are they having for dinner? Chicken raised in a crowded shed.”

In rural Scotland, landowners and environmental campaigners are clashing over the practice of deer management, with some estates fearing the loss of traditional hunting incomes as campaigners argue for more culling to protect forestry and peatlands.

An estimated 1mn-plus wild deer in Scotland are jeopardising nature restoration efforts by eating saplings, damaging habitats and trampling peatland, which releases carbon emissions and contributes to climate change.

“The Scottish government has set ambitious targets on nature and climate,” said David Fleetwood, policy director at the John Muir Trust, a conservation charity. “To meet them, deer densities need to reduce to levels that allow for natural regeneration.”

By 2030, Scotland aims to halt biodiversity loss and achieve widespread ecosystem restoration by 2045, in line with its net zero emissions target.

For many estates, sporting income offsets the costs of hiring a deer stalker © Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/FT

The government hopes raising the cull rate of deer could help meet this ambition.

It could also reduce the cost of mitigation measures, such as fencing, and boost the venison industry, providing more of the lean, climate-friendly protein into the national diet.

Yet the difficult and exhausting process of shooting deer, often in gruelling wintry conditions, is a practical obstacle to nature agency NatureScot’s target of increasing the estimated total annual cull of about 200,000 by 50,000.

Protect the Wild, which campaigns against hunting, said “wildlife management” should not be outsourced to “trophy hunters and armed tourists”. Any control should be through non-lethal methods and by re-establishing predators into the ecosystem, it added.

But with 80 per cent of the annual deer cull carried out mainly by estates, charities and individuals, the natural environment bill is proposing tighter regulation via mandates for landowners to cull more deer if nature restoration efforts are threatened.

The bill introduces new powers to support deer management where high herd numbers prevent work to tackle the climate and biodiversity crises from being effective, the government said.

“The whole point of bringing deer numbers down is to meet climate targets and restore degraded nature — we are in bad shape in terms of biodiversity,” said Ariane Burgess, a Scottish Green MSP who sits on the rural affairs committee.  

The legislation was unclear about the conditions under which NatureScot could demand landowners cull herds, said Ross Ewing, director of moorland at Scottish Land & Estates.

“It could be perilous for them,” he added. “We can’t say whether the legislation will be reasonable and proportionate.”

Environmentally focused estates that concentrate on growing trees and restoring peatland have an interest in larger culls than landowners who want to maximise the sporting potential of stalking.  

The estate where Duncan works, which engages in farming sheep and Highland cattle as well as stalking, fears that incentives are being overshadowed by regulatory mandates.

That lack of balance threatens to upend the voluntary system of deer control needed to manage herds that wander across property boundaries, he said.

Wild deer in Scotland are jeopardising restoration by eating saplings, damaging habitats and trampling peatland © Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/FT

“Deer management has been portrayed as polarised, but we have more in common than we used to think,” said Tom Turnbull, chair of the Association of Deer Management Groups. “We are somewhere on a spectrum heading in a similar direction.”

His estate near Loch Fyne is engaged in agriculture, forestry and peatland restoration, while also relying on some income from stalking guests. Over-regulation could undermine the voluntary nature of collaborative deer culls, he added.

“Stalkers themselves know if they reduce numbers too much, they are shooting themselves out of a job,” he said.

For many estates, sporting income offsets the costs of hiring a deerstalker and £1 a kilo loss on every carcass sold for venison.

Of the 553,000 people involved in shooting in 2022, almost a quarter were deer stalkers, according to a British Association for Shooting and Conservation commissioned report. Shooting contributed £3.3bn to the UK economy and supported 67,000 jobs, it said.

Ewing, himself an amateur stalker, said incentives for increasing the cull in lowland areas could be “more radical and ambitious”, including payments per carcass, especially of females, as well as building more community larders to facilitate sales into the venison market.

“People can often generate more from sporting guests,” he said. Guests pay up to £1,200 to shoot a stag.

NatureScot is piloting incentivisation schemes, including paying £70 for each adult female deer culled above a minimum threshold of five deer per 100 hectares.

If the government succeeds in reducing the deer population, eating habits may also have to change.

Venison, once the preserve of specialist butchers, is increasingly found in supermarkets, fuelling a 35 per cent increase in sales over five years for Dundee’s Highland Game products, including burgers and steaks.

When Christian Nissen founded the company in 1997, it processed 15,000 deer a year — almost all of which was exported. Now, only a fifth of its 75,000 deer a year are exported as the domestic market has developed.

But any increase in what Highland Game describes as the deer “harvest” would require further investment into the marketing and processing infrastructure of companies such as his.

“Imagine what we could do if we could raise the profile and benefits of venison and get our protein up the agenda,” he added.