It’s just before 7am in mid-April, and in a small woodland in Berkshire, two young deer stalkers, Ethan Prince and Joe Hayward, have spotted a Reeves’ muntjac in the undergrowth.
Ethan, in his late 20s, sets up his ‘sticks’ – a device resembling a two-legged tripod, on which he rests his CZ 600 rifle and peers through the scope mounted on top.
The muntjac, the smallest deer in the UK, is about 50m away. It’s not a native species, but it thrives here. Ethan is aiming for the brain cavity, a space, he explains, about the size of a golf ball as he makes an ‘O’ shape with his thumb and forefinger.
“With the sticks, I can hit something up to 100–150m away,” he says. “Anything further, I’d lie down. My max shot is about 200m. It takes practice.”
Biding his time, Ethan takes the shot, the sound muffled by a moderator. We walk over to the muntjac, and though the bullet has hit exactly where Ethan intended, it is still twitching. This is normal, Joe says.
The deer is tiny, not much bigger than a hare. After taking another, larger muntjac, Ethan and Joe gut and partially dismember the two carcasses (a process known as ‘gralloching’, which must be done soon after death to preserve the quality of the meat) and take them to a dedicated game processing unit behind Chieveley Services.
In total, there’s probably about 10–12kg of meat here, which will earn Joe – because he owns the stalking rights for the land on which the deer were shot – about £22–26, arguably scant reward for a morning’s work.
Joe and Ethan shoot deer as a hobby. They aim to earn back the money they spend on stalking rights (£2,000 for the estate Joe hunts on), their kit (Joe’s rifle and scope set him back £5,000) and other ongoing expenses through selling the meat.
Luckily, not everything in the area is as small as these muntjac. A single fallow deer could yield 30kg, or £66 worth, of sellable venison.
A growing problem
Just about everyone – stalkers, foresters, farmers, conservationists – agree there are too many deer in Britain. The generally quoted figure is two million, though estimates of up to nearly three million are bandied about, and this compares with 450,000 in the 1970s.
Apart from cars and people, they have no predators, and control measures have not been sufficient since deer dispersed from parks and private estates into the wider landscape after World War 1. As Gareth Fisher of the RSPB notes, there is “some uncertainty around numbers”, but it’s nevertheless said that we’ve got more deer than when William the Conqueror arrived in 1066.
It doesn’t help that, along with our two native deer, red and roe, we have three other non-native species besides muntjac – sika, fallow and Chinese water deer. Exactly why deer numbers have exploded in this way is down to a variety of factors – not just the absence of wolves and lynx and reduced culling efforts, but also milder winters, the expansion of commercial forestry and the planting of winter crops on which the animals can feed.
Muntjac and Chinese water deer breed throughout the year, so numbers are thought to be increasing rapidly. But what’s the problem? Isn’t it a good thing there’s more wildlife?
Impact of deer
No, because over-dense deer populations have negative impacts on woodland, preventing the regeneration of young trees and reducing the growth of scrub habitat. “Scrub is really important for species such as dormice, nightingales and marsh tits,” says Gareth.
According to the BTO, the 41 per cent decline in singing male nightingales over the past three decades is mainly down to the loss and fragmentation of scrubby woodland habitat.
It’s estimated that 350,000 deer are culled each year (and most of these are in Scotland), but to start reducing the overall number, that figure should be more like 750,000.
The problem, says Charles Smith-Jones, technical advisor at the British Deer Society (BDS), is a lack of coordination between landowners, especially in the south. “There’s no joined-up approach,” Charles says. If deer are controlled on one patch of land but not another, they can just take refuge where they know they’re safe.
Ben Harrower from BH Wildlife Consultancy, who surveys wildlife – mainly deer – across the UK and Europe using drones equipped with thermal-imaging technology, has recorded many herds of fallow deer in England that exceed 500 individuals. Once, he counted a staggering 1,800 animals.
“A lot of these herds are female-dominant,” he says, “and there needs to be a management focus on females if these numbers are to be brought down.”
Deer-management policy
All these issues are why the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) published a new deer-management policy earlier this year, with an emphasis on providing targeted grants and helping landowners work together, especially in so-called priority areas where numbers are highest. Night-time shooting licences will become easier to obtain, too.
But whether all this will be enough to shift the dial sufficiently is debatable. Many, perhaps most, landowners are not going to increase or start deer control without the incentive of – at the very least – making the money back through the sale of the meat.
But there’s a problem there – there’s not a particularly big demand for venison in this country. We eat between 4,000–5,000 tonnes of venison in the UK, much of which comes from the cull of wild red deer in Scotland, and this figure is showing little sign of increasing.
“There is a major barrier to mounting a successful deer cull and that, bluntly, is a lack of venison-eating culture,” the then Conservative MP Sir Charles Walker told Parliament in 2023.
Adding venison to the menu
One person trying to rectify this is chef Leon Challis-Davies, also culinary director at Eat Wild, a marketing body that works with retailers and catering companies to sell more products containing venison.
Leon is also involved with a processing unit called Oakland Park. He cites how Oakland – which was set up by Joe and Ethan’s fathers at a cost of £2 million a few years ago – has been selling venison to one particular butcher for £27 a kilo. The butcher itself then prices its own products – sausages, burgers or whatever – at £67.50 a kilo.
And remember, the shooters themselves get only £2.20 a kilo.
“We’ve got this £40 on top – and for what?” asks Leon. “We’re driving people out of the market. I’m saying make venison accessible to everyone. Venison is very cheap to start with, but ends up very expensive for no reason other than profit and greed.”
It’s true that many venison products are available for £20–25 a kilo, but that’s still at least three times the price of mainstream supermarket chicken.
Animal rights groups say deer culling is unethical and counter-productive, and that alternative strategies such as habitat management and fencing should be used instead.
But Gareth Fisher says research shows the public accept the need for deer control if it furthers environmental and conservation aims. Reintroducing native predators would make little dent in the numbers – it’s a beguilingly neat idea, but wolves and lynx couldn’t live alongside us across Britain in the same way that deer do.
At Oakland Park, later in the morning, Leon cuts some fillet from one of Ethan’s carcasses and cooks it with potatoes, spinach and eggs. It’s not gamey at all, but mild and succulent, and that’s from someone who classes himself a vegetarian.
It’s generally agreed that muntjac yields some of the best-tasting venison. Perhaps we should all make a little more effort to consume wild deer, if that will help to preserve and enhance our woodlands, and leave more precious scrub habitat intact for endangered British species such as nightingales and dormice.
And if that’s not the answer, what is?
