WEEKEND READ: The shooting of a rare white stag in Bootle near Liverpool, UK, was met with an outpouring of indignation across social media from animal activists and ‘animal lovers’ alike. The obvious questions arose about whether the police made the right call, but are we missing the real issue? With deer populations around urban areas on the rise, the next shooting is almost inevitable.

A nine-hour chase through Bootle town centre last weekend ended in tragedy as police apparently had no other option but to ‘euthanise’ - or shoot and kill - a white fallow deer. It isn’t known how exactly the stag found his way into the busy urban surroundings, but with deer populations on the rise across the country, it was only a matter of time before something like this happened.

What’s perplexing about what took place that day is that this isn’t the first time, nor will it be the last, that a deer has been seen in a town or city. Far from it. The deer population in the UK is at the highest it has ever been at approximately two million. Fallow deer aren’t even native to the UK and are believed to have been introduced in the 11th century from mainland Europe by the Normans.

Urban deer and muntjacs are becoming far more common sights, so much so that the British Deer Society (BDS) has been running a deer distribution survey since 2016 and inviting members of the public to report sightings via its mobile app. In 2017 a muntjac  - less common than fallow deer having only been introduced to the UK from Asia in the last 150 years - had to be rescued by firefighters from a garden in Peterborough, while a recent TikTok video showed another muntjac running through the red brick streets of a northern English city in broad daylight.

The results of the BDS survey show that sightings of fallow deer in particular - the same species as the Bootle stag - are being confirmed in the vicinity of major UK towns and cities. Mostly in the south of England and Scotland, but in recent years they are becoming increasingly common in cities in northern counties across Yorkshire, Lancashire and Merseyside.

This is backed up by research by the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT), which has recorded the number of reported deer shootings in Britain since 1960 as an indicator of general deer numbers, concentrating on roe deer, fallow deer, red deer and Chinese muntjacs. For fallow deer there has been a clear expansion of populations originating in the south of England and moving northward. In Bootle’s county of Merseyside, where the white stag was shot, there were virtually no recorded killings between 1960 and 1999, but in the last decade, there were shootings for the first time in neighbouring Lancashire. Again, these are only reported shootings by ‘contributing shoots’ and may not include unlicensed hunting meaning that the true figures could be higher.

The reasons for the rise in urban deer are many. Fragmentation of natural, countryside habitats has accelerated in recent years as we humans build more housing outwards making interactions with wildlife inevitable - in essence, we’re competing with deer, badgers and so on for space and reducing their normal feeding grounds in the process.

Towns and cities also present a wealth of feeding opportunities. Urban foxes raid our rubbish bins, pigeons clear up crumbs from city pavements, and deer are drawn to our pristine and well-maintained lawns, ponds and flowerbeds. In fact, many of us go out of our way to encourage the feeding of wildlife in our gardens, despite the problems that can create - we recently reported on how using bird tables and feeders can unfairly favour some species over others and even alter the distribution of entire populations.

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Researchers in Spain even found that despite being typically forest-dwelling animals, deer populations around golf courses were booming particularly those of red deer and fallow deer. The golf courses, it seems, “offer important resources for deer species” leading to “a significant increase in deer-human conflicts in the area.” The same resources offered by golf courses - fresh grazing pasture and water availability in the form of artificial ponds - can be found very easily in towns and cities, particularly in people’s gardens.

In 2019, the Royal Horticultural Society released guidance on how to deer-proof outdoor spaces, including replacing tulips with daffodils and red hot pokers because deer don’t like the taste - although this wasn’t enough to prevent the shooting of ten deer in the grounds of Worsley New Hall by the RHS a year later. The deer, they said, were causing damage to plants, shrubs and trees, and relocation efforts were abandoned due to Covid-19.

It turns out that deer love “roses, clematis, sweet Williams, lupins, heathers and bluebells, but will eat virtually anything if they’re hungry enough,” according to Wise Living Magazine citing the RHS. “They are also territorial, so once they’re in, it’s going to be difficult to get them out.” Other recommendations include putting up good fencing and using manmade and natural deterrents like chemical sprays and human urine.

However, rather than everyone urinating in their gardens and on city streets to prevent the next stag shooting, it seems that the Bootle tragedy highlighted an obvious lack of preparedness by local police. This isn’t unexpected given that deer sightings are more common in other areas, but again, population numbers have doubled since 1999 so it’s time for authorities to wise up.

The problem faced by police that day was a perceived danger to the public and the welfare of the stag, which seems somewhat of a contradiction given that they shot him to death. Ian Critchley, deputy Deputy Chief Constable of Merseyside Police, still maintained that he was ‘proud’ of all the officers involved.

"At the heart of our decision making was first of all the safety of the public, and the risk that a distressed deer in a built-up environment presented to motorists, cyclists, pedestrians. But also right at the centre of the decisions we made was the deer itself, as such from the outset the aim was to sedate and move the deer safely to a rural environment,” he said.

"In conjunction with advice from a local vet the attempts over nine hours were made to tranquilise the deer and a rural location was identified to safely transfer it, to minimise further distress and ensure its safety. Despite several tranquiliser darts being successfully deployed into the deer, this failed to sedate the animal.”

Other reports state that police had confined the deer to an industrial estate, while the RSPCA had advised them to let the stag find his own way back to wherever he came from. Whether the police made the right decision or not is up for debate, though most social media commentators would say that the police simply gave up trying. The broader issue, however, is why they weren’t better prepared, how they failed to find the right help from wildlife specialists, and what they’re going to do to avoid this ever happening again.

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Scottish nature agency NatureScot provides advice to local authorities and road planners on how to plan out road schemes and urban layouts to avoid interactions with deer, including landscaping and fence design, and the proper management of vegetation palatable to deer.

The London Wildlife Trust, which runs its London Deer Survey, has also called for deer management practices due to the lack of natural predators including the wolves and lynx that were once present in Britain. Wild deer, the Trust said, were more commonly seen in London’s outer fringes such as Barnet, Bromley and Croydon, but sightings are being reported in Sydenham Hill Wood and Tooting Bec Common. It turns out that deer species use farmland, allotments and London’s railway banks to move around at night.

The key to preventing further deer shootings in any urban area would seem to be devising better policies as part of effective deer management plans, something other countries like Australia and the US have far more experience with than the UK. In 2009, the Deer Initiative produced a report on methods to control wild deer populations for urban environments in England, looking comparatively at approaches taken elsewhere in Europe and in the US. Methods evaluated for use in the UK included non-lethal techniques like capture and relocation of deer herds and the use of immuno-contraception (implants) to keep numbers down, but it concluded that these were relatively ineffective.

Two case studies from the US - Angel Island near San Francisco in the 1980s and Ardenwood Regional Park in the 1990s - brought into question the efficacy of non-lethal methods. Fierce opposition to lethal methods by the public and animal protection groups had prompted authorities to give the green light to the use of contraceptives and relocation. However, it turned out that too few deer could be tranquilised and chipped in a given period for contraception to be effective, and relocating deer to the closest suitable location actually resulted in more deer deaths with something like one in ten surviving the first year. This was due to the presence of natural predators - not a problem in the UK - but also because the deer had grown used to easy food and access to water.

In the UK, cutting urban deer off from access to lawns, tulips and ponds and relocating them to forests where life for them may be harder, presents something of a dilemma. This also fails to address the elephant in the room: the complete absence of natural predators. Wolves and lynx went extinct in the UK long ago, and while young fawns may fall prey to foxes and eagles, this small amount of natural predation clearly isn’t holding back deer populations.

Is culling really the solution? Conservationists would have us believe so, as would gamekeepers and other land managers, but it isn’t as clear cut as some might think. In the US in 1995, the Wildlife Society released its Urban Deer: a Manageable Resource report, compiling articles from university natural resource and conservation departments. Daniel Decker and Milo Richmond of Cornell University recognised that the most pressing problem when establishing deer management plans was actually the human dimension.

“Certainly important biological and ecological questions exist in urban deer management, but perhaps the most pressing problems arise from the human dimension,” they said. “Hunters tend not to want wildlife agencies to advocate any alternatives to hunting. They resist setting a precedent for nonhunting solutions to deer population control, and perhaps eventually management of other hunted species because they are concerned about diminishing the importance of hunting. Many wildlife managers feel the same way, a reflection of their pro-hunting values and conventions of the profession.”

Could the same then be said of the UK? Are conservationists who advocate for culls really only defaulting to the status quo and deep-seated pro-hunting bias? Scottish Natural Heritage provides ‘best practice guides’ that recognise the same concerns that Merseyside Police stated - public safety e.g. deer-vehicle collisions (DVCs) and deer welfare - but also the transmission of TB and zoonotic diseases, and quickly goes on to recommend the correct guns and ammunition to use or where to cut with a knife when dispatching injured deer.

Advocates of deer culls even claim that hunting for ‘venison’ is justifiable as a means to address food shortages and move people away from intensive farming of cows and other farm animals. However, in a recent Surge article, we showed that this is largely an unfounded claim - most UK venison comes from Scotland, which culls 100,000 deer each year yielding 3,500 tonnes of meat, nowhere near enough to have an impact on the demand for cow flesh. In fact, 1,200 tonnes of venison are imported from farms in New Zealand, Poland and Ireland with domestic deer farms also on the rise.

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Is the answer therefore to reintroduce natural predators to the UK, to bring back wild wolves and lynxes? Given how contentious the issue of wild animal suffering is in the context of animal rights, this is certainly something to discuss in another article. Suffice to say, proponents of rewilding as an alternative to animal agriculture - that is the returning of managed agricultural land to a wild state with woodlands and natural, unhindered growth of foliage and flora to sequester atmospheric carbon and improve soil health - also understand that natural fauna would be part of that. Native grazing herbivores, but also natural population controls. Hunting by predators, and also allowing disease to kill herbivores without human intervention, seems an uncomfortable aspect of rewilding for those of us who love animals but respect Mother Nature’s ways.

That being said, the presence of fallow deer in the UK only dates back to the 11th century, or possibly Roman times according to a competing theory, while muntjacs as previously mentioned are very recent arrivals, just a few human generations past. This would exclude them from the rewilding debate, which applies more to Britain’s native herbivores going back millennia such as aurochs, the wild ancestors of sheep, plus small herbivores like hares and rabbits.

If we recognise that fallow deer are not native to the UK, does that make them an invasive species like grey squirrels? Deer compete with native wildlife, much like grey squirrels - arrivals from the US in the 1890s - are pushing out our beloved red squirrels. Deer are also a managed species in many places, having been introduced by gamekeepers specifically to be hunted by landowners, and it is mismanagement over the centuries that has given us the moral quandary with which we are today faced.

Sadly, simply allowing deer populations to grow without any sort of intervention and management can lead to immense suffering. In the US, deer control - both lethal and non-lethal - was supported because deer there were starving to death. There simply wasn’t enough vegetation to support the numbers. Local animal protection groups were even given public funding to feed deer for some years, though this could never be a long-term solution, creating a population dependent on human handouts that suffered anyway when those handouts stopped. It could be said that the same is happening in UK gardens, the people who knowingly encourage deer into their gardens by planting palatable vegetation, creating an unnatural dependency on humans. 

The answer is not clear, nor will it be a comfortable one. For these modern times, as Bootle clearly showed us, police need to prepare themselves properly. They need to consult with wildlife organisations who understand non-lethal methods of deer control and are free of hunting bias; create effective contingency plans for dealing with deer incursions including protocols for closing roads and diverting traffic; and urban planners must give more thought to encroachment, habitat fragmentation and how to discourage deer from venturing too far into towns and cities.

But perhaps the moral of the story is to acknowledge that once again, our exploitation of animals and resources has led to another terrible situation for animals. We introduced deer to this country to hunt them, granted it was before we understood conservation or the value and sanctity of non-human life, but humans are to blame once again. Deer shouldn’t have to lose their lives for our mistakes.

Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.

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