Scotland’s deer are proving deeply divisive

On the face of it, a book about a woman stalking one red deer might not sound that exciting. Just one? It’s estimated that there are nearly a million in the Scottish hills and around 60,000 are culled every year. So why write about a single kill? But in Hindsight Jenna Watt goes far deeper into Scotland’s relationship with red deer. It may be a book about deer, but it’s also about people, habitats, history, landownership, grief and belonging.

Watt’s interest in the animals stems from reading George Monbiot’s book Feral. From there she falls down the rabbit hole of rewilding, regeneration, conservation and environmentalism. As a born and bred Highlander, she can’t quite believe that her home is ‘at the forefront of such ambitious ecological restoration and species introduction’. She goes back to university to study sustainable rural development and gradually feels the pull of one specific species.

The red deer has long been emblematic of the wild Highlands. Edwin Landseer’s ‘The Monarch of the Glen’, with the majestic 12-pointer stag standing proudly against a backdrop of misty crags, inevitable comes to mind. But for many this is a romanticised image – a paean to the Victorians who encouraged shooting estates, built hunting lodges and in late summer would descend on Scotland, laden with dogs, guns and tweeds.

While deer have done much to create the landscape we see in Scotland today, people now increasingly believe that their ‘habitat shaping’ is regressive rather than an asset. Scotland supports the largest population of red deer in Europe, and this has more than doubled in the past 50 years. Deer eat young trees and the green shoots of vegetation, and overgrazing can damage peat, an important carbon store that needs preserving, not destroying. Modern landowners, many of whom are more interested in rewilding, nature recovery, reforestation or simply acquiring carbon credits, tend to see them as a pest.

And so deer have ended up at the centre of a fight about land use and ownership in Scotland. This is why Watt decides that to fully understand this skirmish she must shoot one herself. She carefully chooses a hind stalk, removing from the equation the macho quest to kill the animal with the biggest antlers. Throughout the book she returns to her stalk, while also describing meetings with rewilding enthusiasts, peatland experts, gamekeepers, landowners, beaver reintroducers and deer stalkers.

It is an emotional journey. Watt likes to use the term ‘ecological grief’, and finds many things she learns along the way personally affecting. What makes her uncomfortable is that so much of what’s changing in upland land management is being done to Highlanders, rather than by them. Many of those she encounters – such as Anders Povlsen, the Danish retail billionaire who is also the UK’s biggest landowner – have made their money through hugely polluting industries. How do their rewilding plans differ from greenwashing? And what do the locals, whose families may have lived in Scotland for centuries, think of the changes to ‘their’ country?

One of her most interesting conversations is with Paul Lister, the millionaire heir to the MFI fortune and owner of the Alladale Wilderness Reserve, north of Inverness. This bills itself as ‘the wild side of the Highlands’, and most people know of it through Lister’s highly controversial plans to re-introduce wolves.

Watt visits Alladale with the reserve’s manager, Innes MacNeill. A Highlander like herself, he worked there before Lister arrived, shooting his first hind at the age of 11. He was a deer stalker by profession, before the restoration project began and stalking as a paid-for activity was removed from the agenda. But Watt glimpses the deer stalker that Innes is deep down when he talks of tree-planting in terms of putting deer back where they belong: ‘Deer are forest animals’, he explains. ‘We just bred the forest out of them’.

At other times she feels as though Lister is talking to her through his employee, ‘and I didn’t like what he had to say. I couldn’t help but feel that in some ways Innes and his cultural heritage were being used to legitimise or give credibility to Lister’s actions within a gamekeeping Highland community.’

Perhaps it’s no surprise then that she fails to warm to Lister when she speaks to him via Zoom. When he explains that he feels the solution to the global climate crisis is to ‘stop breeding’, she has to bite her tongue. Population control, she feels, is a ‘convenient peg on which to hang global climate crisis issues... while also failing to challenge the real drivers: corporate greed and overconsumption’.

Her opinions change in the course of the book. She discovers that her great-great-grandfather had been a gamekeeper on the Drumochter estate, near Dalwhinnie. Is this why she is drawn to deer, she wonders, and why she feels this ecological grief so keenly?

When Watt embarks on her quest she has a definite view of where she would like to stalk. She looks for an estate which pursues ‘what I deemed at the time to be “good” land practices, such as habitat restoration and/or species reintroduction’. No muirburn or grouse shooting, she specifies. She ends up choosing the Corrour estate, owned by Lisbet Rausing of the Tetra Pak family, and concludes:

“I was naive to think that the ecological wellbeing of land could ever be attributed to something as binary as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ estates... It was naive, too, to think that planting trees was synonymous with good management, and conversely muirburn with poor management.