Centring Scottish deer stalkers’ views

Research Lead: Dr Callum Leavy-Wilson, CSFL PhD researchers, School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh

Author: Rachel Orchard, CSFL digital media officer and PhD researcher, School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh

Research recently published by Dr Callum Leavey-Wilson found that a critical group of practitioners, deer stalkers, have varied and nuanced perspectives on the changes in practice, climate, and policy occurring in land management across the Scottish Highlands. The findings support the need to make more space for deer stalkers’ experiential knowledge in decision-making on land-use.

The research article published in BES’s People and Nature journal draws on Callum’s interviews with deer stalkers from across Scotland, whom he found through his work with the Common Ground Forum and the Finding the Common Ground on Sustainable Upland Deer Management (FtCG) process.

Read on to hear about Callum’s research experience, including joining deer stalkers on the ground to understand their daily lives, or head straight to the full article following this link: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pan3.70277

Changing landscapes and livelihoods

Deer hunting, known as ‘stalking’ is often carried out on privately-owned ‘sporting’ estates. Stalking grew in popularity during the 19^th c. and has been a dominant land-use in the Scottish Highlands ever since. However, in recent decades there is a trend of private landowners’ objectives shifting from stalking for sport to conservation culling for ecological restoration. This has consequences for the landscapes, the animals found there and the people working with them.

As well as shifting landowner objectives, the policy landscape is shaping the physical landscape. The Scottish Government claims its significant regulatory changes to deer management are part of meeting its climate and biodiversity goals by reducing the environmental impact of deer. For example, by setting a maximum density target of 10 red deer per km² across the upland range. 

Another change to contend with is climate change, which is already shifting the seasonal behaviour of deer in the Scottish Highlands. With milder winters, the deer can stay at higher altitudes for longer, rather than seeking shelter on the lower ground. This is making the work of many stalkers more difficult, and therefore hampering efforts at higher culls.

Navigating these changes are the ~1,000 professional deer stalkers employed by estates to manage the deer across the Scottish Highlands. Callum became interested in researching with deer stalkers when he started work with the Finding the Common Ground process, and noticed that, despite deer stalkers being so central to deer management and land-use in the Highlands, their views and voices had not been well captured or explored to date. 

Talk and stalk

Callum’s PhD research evaluated the Common Ground Forum and the Finding the Common Ground on Sustainable Upland Deer Management (FtCG) projects which aimed to promote positive relationships between a wide range of deer management stakeholders in the Scottish Highlands over the course of 18 months in 2022-2024. By observing the process, Callum investigated the tensions and conflict between stakeholders and assessed how the mediation projects approached remedying the environmental conflict.

For the most recent publication, Callum drew on interviews with 19 deer stalkers and asked about their opinions on Scottish Government reforms to deer management through the Natural Environment (Scotland) Act, their motivations for being a deer stalker and what they felt about the future of land-use in the Highlands and their place in it.

Callum’s analysis ordered the responses into the views expressed on the values embedded in the profession, the knowledge gained through experience and through science, and the informal and formal rules and regulations. This is known as the Values-Rules-Knowledge (VRK) framework, which was found to be useful way of understanding where stalkers’ perceptions were in agreement or were more varied in the decision-making context of deer management.

The social side of stalking

Whereas deer stalkers are often grouped together, Callum found that there was a wide variety of perspectives in facing the changing landscapes with some feeling a sense of loss and others viewing challenges as opportunities. Using the words of the stalkers where possible, a selection of the nuanced and varied perspectives include:

• Stalkers feel immense pride in their local knowledge of the land and deer which they gained through extensive experience on the land and sometimes through generational passing on of the profession: ‘It was in my family and, earliest memories, that was the only thing I was ever going to do.’
• The changing rules around stalking spark concern by some stalkers about the increasing pressure to carry out non-selective culling, which loses the connection to managing deer traditionally: ‘when you're being pressured to shoot a lot of deer, you lose that professionalism because you're not really picking anymore.’
• Younger stalkers may be more likely to engage with scientific knowledge: ‘the young brigade, they are very forward thinking. They have habitat monitoring skills.’
• The social side of stalking, taking guests out onto the hill to experience the landscape, is an integral part of the role for some deer stalkers: ‘if someone told me tomorrow, I wasn't allowed to take people out stalking, I would really miss that.’
• Changing public attitudes to deer management are making some stalkers feel unable to be openly proud about their profession: ‘there's that much resentment to killing things nowadays. I would never say I'm a deer stalker now. I just don't want that hassle’.

Callum concludes by noting the importance of recognising how changes in land-use policy can be felt unevenly, with those working in traditional settings with long-established practices feeling the impact more strongly. By generating greater awareness of this imbalance and creating space to understand the perspectives of those with close relationships to the land during the current tide of change, hopefully the knowledge, experience and skills of these individuals can remain valued rather than lost.

Interested in reading more? Find the full open-access article by following the link here: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pan3.70277