This article appears as part of the Winds of Change newsletter.

How we kill deer, who does it, and for what reason, is an emotive issue. When I was researching last week’s piece for the Herald on the John Muir Trust, the question was never whether the deer should be shot, but how, to what purpose, in what numbers, and whether the groups who approach it differently, with differing aims, can come together.

That question has relevance not only in Assynt, one of the areas I was writing about, where John Muir Trust had a strategy of contracting out deer culling, and some stalking was, in late 2022, carried out by the CEO, David Balharry, himself, but elsewhere.

Notably, no one on either side of this sometimes toxic debate is saying we should not be shooting deer. The tension is between two different groups who both shoot deer – the stalkers of the sporting estates who see deer as an asset, and the conservation organisations managing deer to keep their numbers low in order to allow landscape-level regeneration.

The situation in 2022 at Assynt

At Assynt, the John Muir Trust’s approach has been very different from that of its neighbouring Assynt Crofters Trust. The latter, formed from the first community buy-out in Scotland, whilst not a sporting estate, operates in similar ways, using money raised through stalking to do other jobs around the estate. For them this is an "income stream".

For the John Muir Trust, as CEO David Balharry explained in a 2023 podcast interview carried out as part of the making of American documentary-maker Tom Opre’s The Last Keeper, the culling is about keeping deer density low enough to allow trees to grow. “Whatever numbers of deer need to be culled to get the trees to grow, that’s what we do.”

Both sides however seem to agree in their liking trees and keenness to restore them - though they differ on which trees in which places, and how.

Bob Cook from the Assynt Crofter's Trust described their approach of fencing and........

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