Deer, oh deer
I refer to your March issue and 'A community cull of the wild'. This is a very poor article taking as its sole source, it would appear, Scottish Environment LINK’s recent publication Managing deer for climate, communities and conservation, a campaigning document based on a longstanding agenda to reduce red deer numbers by at least 50%.
The Scottish Natural Heritage report published in November 2019 estimated the open range red deer population as 300,000, a reduction of 9% since the Millennium, and now at an average density of 9.3/sq km. Your article states that 'numbers have never been higher' and that the red deer population in Scotland is currently 1.5m with 10/sq km as the maximum number of deer 'recommended by the Scottish Government'. They have at this point made no such recommendation and this is a gross overstatement of the population.
Certainly, deer eat young trees where they are unprotected, but it should be noted that our red deer share their range with 600,000 sheep, feral goats, mountain hares, and rabbits, all of which also require to be excluded from new plantations and regeneration areas.
As to the community cull concept, the great majority of the lowland deer cull, mostly roe deer, is carried out by community recreational stalkers at little or no cost to them. Stag hunting is the main source of revenue supporting deer management and is comparatively inexpensive in the global market, and hind culling is available for as little as £150 per day. In short, the management system proposed in this article is already largely in place.
As for the methane output of wild deer quoted this has never been researched. The majority of the peatlands in Scotland, and much of the land most suited to woodland expansion, are in the red deer area where land managers have been at the forefront of responding to the climate emergency. 19,000 hectares of peatland restoration have already been completed and 33,349 hectares of woodland expansion undertaken since 2008 and there is an accelerating programme of this across the Highlands.
It is regrettable that so much journalistic effort generally is devoted to demonising deer and those associated with their management.
Richard Cooke, Chairman of The Association of Deer Management Groups, Brechin
“The women had to be taught separately from the men
In March 1869, Jex-Blake’s application was approved by Edinburgh University only to eventually be rejected by the university court who said that because lectures would have to be conducted separately, admitting her wasn’t financially viable and they weren’t prepared to make the necessary arrangements ‘in the interest of one lady’. The faculty at the university were divided with one Robert Christison, Professor of Medicine and Therapeutics, even stating that ‘the poor intellectual ability and stamina of women would lower professional standards’.
This is where many people might have given up the fight, but not Jex-Blake. With a bit of persuasion, the editor of The Scotsman, Alexander Russel, agreed to run a campaign in the paper to encourage more women with an interest in studying medicine to join Jex-Blake. One of the women who joined the campaign was Helen Evans, who would go on to marry and have three children with Russel.
Eventually one became seven, and the campaign for the group to be allowed to study medicine at Edinburgh University quickly gathered momentum. Jex-Blake was joined by Isabel Thorne, Edith Pechey, Matilda Chaplin, Helen Evans, Mary Anderson Marshall and Emily Bovell, all of whom passed the matriculation exam and were admitted to the university medical school. They were the first women to ever matriculate at a British university.
However, the battle was far from over. The women had to be taught separately from the men, were subject to different grading scales despite being taught and assessed on exactly the same material, and would often have to arrange their own lectures as a loophole meant staff weren’t ‘obligated’ to teach women. They were also charged higher fees and had to face constant low-level aggravation, with many of the male students behaving aggressively towards the women, slamming doors in their faces and shouting abuse at them.
There was even a suggestion from Professor Laycock, an Edinburgh University staff member, that women seeking medical careers might be ‘basely inclined’ or ‘Magdalenes’, in other words they could be promiscuous or prostitutes. Despite these difficult and unpleasant circumstances, the women demonstrated they were entirely capable of handling the curriculum. Four of the women were in the honours list for
Physiology and Chemistry. Edith Pechey achieved the top results in chemistry and should have won the Hope Scholarship but it was instead awarded to a man who had the second highest marks.
Tensions came to a head in 1870 when the women were due to sit their anatomy exam in Surgeon’s Hall. An angry mob of seven hundred male students gathered to try to stop the women from entering the hall. They were pelted with mud and rubbish before eventually being pulled into the hall when a supporter unbolted the door. To cause further chaos and disruption, the men released a live sheep into the hall.
The riot was covered by Edinburgh newspapers and support began to build for the women, with a number of influential academics, a group which included Charles Darwin, supporting their right to equal education. Fellow students who sympathised with the women began meeting them after classes to escort them home to 15 Buccleuch Place in the city’s Old Town.
While the women’s plight struck a chord with the public, there remained staunch opposition within the university itself and four years after they began
their studies, the Edinburgh seven were prevented from graduating and denied a degree.
After a failed attempt to sue the university, Jex-Blake, along with Pechey, travelled to Berne in Switzerland to gain their MD before sitting the Irish exams at the College of Physicians in Dublin, finally enabling them to become doctors in Britain.
Jex-Blake was instrumental in setting up the London School of Medicine for Women before returning to Scotland’s capital to open the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women in 1886. When a competing school, the Medical College for Women, opened and gained access to the Royal Infirmary, Jex-Blake’s own establishment could not compete and closed in 1898. However, in the meantime she had set up Edinburgh Hospital and Dispensary for Women where she worked until her retirement in 1899.
While not all seven of the women went on to achieve their MD, the rest of the Edinburgh Seven moved on to jobs connected with the field. More importantly, they had inflicted a decisive breach on the gender bar in higher education with the result that in 1894 the University of Edinburgh allowed women to complete a degree with its first female doctors graduating in 1896.
In 2019, 150 years after the Edinburgh Seven enrolled at the University of Edinburgh, their alma mater awarded all seven women posthumous degrees. It marked the end of a story of sheer determination and an unwavering ambition to achieve a dream, not only for the Edinburgh Seven but for the generations since then who, because of their sex, have been told ‘no’.