Undiscovered Scotland

 

Anyone who's enjoyed Scotland's open spaces will have encountered the country's largest native species of land animal, the red deer. Though, to be honest, you don't need to have traversed hills or climbed mountains to be aware of them: you can often find red deer within settlements in the Highlands and you are guaranteed to see them depicted in souvenir shops or on tins of shortbread. But there's more to our relationship with red deer than the The Monarch of the Glen, the painting by Sir Edwin Landseer that seemingly spawned a million prints. Or is there? There's a sense that the painting perfectly captures the Victorian idea of a red deer stag as an animal to be hunted for sport, an idea that has persisted down through the years all the way to the present day.

"Locked Antlers: The Battle Over Scotland’s Deer" by Mike Daniels is a fascinating and thought-provoking account of the decades-old conflict between, on the one hand, landowners who seek to keep red deer populations large to ensure their availability for sport shooting and, on the other, those who take a broader view of land management and seek to keep deer populations at more sustainable - which means much smaller - levels.

The author, Mike Daniels, has been involved in the issue since 1986 when, as he recounts in his introduction, he undertook voluntary work for the Nature Conservancy Council for Scotland and witnessed his first deer being culled. After a career involved in land management and deer management, he is now a lecturer and researcher at the Centre of Mountain Studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands, where he teaches sustainable deer management. He is therefore uniquely qualified to write about an issue that remains highly controversial. His position is is obviously on one side of the controversy, but his approach is both reasoned and reasonable and his arguments are compelling. This is a book that should be read by all those referred to in the opening sentence of this review, and more widely by anyone interested in the competing demands of man and nature.

The publisher's description helps set the book in context: "With its natural predators long exterminated, huge deer populations controlled by landowners – largely for their own private interests – have had far-reaching environmental impacts. Despite efforts by conservationists to reduce populations and re-verse the damage, historic deer management has left vast areas of rural Scotland under siege from high deer densities. As the current nature crisis and climate breakdown pushes deer management up the political agenda, the book explores the long-standing conflict around deer in Scotland from the perspective of someone who has been at the heart of the debate for decades. It provides a first-hand insight into some of the most controversial episodes, examining the stories, the science, the culture, the history and the politics beneath the deer conflict. It points to the future – what could be the role of predators, fences and community hunting? What does the next generation of deer managers want, and what does Scotland need in the way it manages its deer?"