Doubts expressed about deer action plan
A leading deer charity has raised significant concerns about the Government’s proposals to manage England’s burgeoning deer population.
The Government published a draft management plan in August and asked for input from various interested parties. The four-week consultation period has ended and the results of this and the official decisions awaited.
The British Deer Society (BDS), however, has expressed concern over the Government’s approach and has questioned whether the consultation is little more than window dressing and that minds had already been made up.
The management plan has been in the offing since Defra unveiled its England Trees Action Plan last year. Controlling the country’s deer population, which some estimates put as much as two million across the UK, the most in a millennium, is a priority to go hand in hand with the Government’s promise to plant more trees in the quest for the country to become carbon neutral by 2050. Too many uncontrolled deer will significantly hinder this, hence the plan.
The BDS, while welcoming in general the move towards a formal plan, said it had a number of specific concerns about the 21 proposals put forward by Defra and the Forestry Commission. These include:
• The simplistic blanketing of the country ’s six species of deer as one general entity
•The removal of a season for the culling of male deer
•Enabling night shooting
Charles Smith-Jones, Sporting Gun contributor, is technical adviser to the BDS and the author of a number of books on deer (see p82 for an extract of his latest), said: “My biggest concern is the removal of a close season from male deer, which I believe flies in the face of intelligent management. I am also concerned about the potential effects of unrestricted night shooting.”
Mr Smith-Jones said that the main issue in England was with fallow deer. In reality, it was only a very small number of master bucks that tended to mate with the fallow does. The majority of males were therefore redundant and to remove them would be wrong-headed. He added that it made more sense to concentrate on the females at an appropriate time as they were the animals producing more deer.
He also said that night shooting raised significant safety concerns in terms of identification of targets and backstops, not to mention a possible by-product of creating a cover for poaching. He said there was a reason night shooting was not currently employed to cull deer, unless in exceptional circumstances.
He said the charity was not enamoured by the approach of Defra and the Forestry Commission with the consultation. He said: “The BDS is concerned that there appears to have been no wider consultation among the major organisations and practitioners, who represent a wide and untapped base of knowledge.”
Ian Tubby, head of policy at the Forestry Commission, said the lack of predators meant that deer posed a “significant risk to our woodlands” and that action was needed.