Scots reject statutory deer management

The Scottish Gamekeepers’ Association (SGA) has responded to a call for a statutory deer management system, after Rob Gibson, a Scottish National Party MSP, said in an article in The Herald that the management of deer by estates was “elitist”.

Mr Gibson said: “Current practices in deer management are failing the biodiversity of the area.” His view was backed by Mike Daniels of the John Muir Trust (JMT), who said Mr Gibson was right to highlight the problem of increasing deer numbers and that he agreed with the idea of statutory deer management. The Scottish Wildlife Trust (SWT)and the JMT also gave a briefing in which they said: “The Scottish Government has a vision and strategy for managing Scotland’s wild deer — the voluntary code is based on the strategy — but we believe that, because of conflicting private versus public interests, those ambitions will not be realised without making sustainable deer management a legal requirement.

The rest of this article appears in the 4th September issue of Shooting Times.

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