This was commissioned by the hunt reform group, Wildlife Network and published by them in October 1999. A critical commentary by Professor Patrick Bateson was published in the original paper version and will I hope shortly be included here.

Author's acknowledgements
Summary
Introduction
Chapter One: Going out with the hunt
Chapter Two: The evidence of suffering
Chapter Three: The irreconcilables
Chapter Four: Conservation, with or without the hounds?
Appendix 1
Appendix 2

Author's acknowledgements
I am of course grateful to the Wildlife Network for their funding of this project, but almost as much for the open-mindedness they displayed in allowing me so free a hand to speak to whoever I liked and ignore whoever I liked. I received real kindness from the hunt. Their knowledge that I had been the hunt's contented guest in the field and afterwards made it all the more generous of the hunt's opponents when they, too, treated me as though it was likely that I would give them a fair run. I thank them all.

Summary
Deer hunting involves many of the issues involved in the far more common fox or hare hunting: cruelty to animals, class warfare, traditional pleasures under threat, the conflict between the welfare of individual animals and welfare of whole populations. But it is also a more extreme case: the cruelties involved are arguably greater, so the animal welfare case for a ban so much the stronger. At the same time, there is a strong case that the conservation of a thriving population of deer can be readily achieved without hunting, and perhaps more easily with its cessation. In both these ways, defending deer hunting is harder than defending the others.
Still, the case that deer hunting is unacceptably cruel is not certain and it is certainly not, finally, a scientific one. This is demonstrated by the inadequacy of the scientific case which opponents of hunting put and the inadequacy of the link between the scientific case and the moral arguments. I take these arguments to be at their clearest in the Bateson Report 1 into deer hunting and on whose disapproval of hunting so much emphasis has been laid recently.

The case that hunting is unacceptable remains a moral and a political one, and one on which there remains plenty of room for principled disagreement amongst us all.

This report was commissioned by Wildlife Network (WN), who believe that the balance of the evidence - the evidence presented in this booklet - makes the case in favour of a ban on deer-hunting. Most people would probably agree. The same evidence leads me to a different conclusion.

Anyway, granted that the ban is at least likely if not inevitable, it is important to discuss what sort of management system might replace the hunt and its hounds. Get this wrong, and the outcome for the deer might well be worse, not better. WN and others have proposals for filling the vacuum. 2

The main value of this booklet will be that it looks dispassionately at an issue on which passions naturally run very high.

Introduction
I knew something of Jim Barrington before he got in touch wondering if I would write an account of stag-hunting. I knew that he had been a successful director of the League Against Cruel Sports but had become disenchanted with the policies he had been driving, and had left, taking several other officers of the campaign with him. These included the former executive director and chairman, Mark Davies, the then treasurer, Howard Hodges, and long-standing regional representative, Steve Watson. This caused a good deal of hilarity in the anti-anti-hunting world, but also a good deal of real pleasure. Most people who support hunting do genuinely find it hard to believe that the anti's genuinely care about animals, or that - even if anti's really do care about animals - it is really animal welfare or animal conservation that fires them to the extent they are obviously fired. In other words, most hunting types, or pro-hunting types, respected Barrington and the others for what they took to be an act of courage and honesty in abandoning the cause. Or rather, for seeing the cause in a different light.
I don't say this is how Barrington saw things.

I knew that he and some of those who left with him had then set up the Wildlife Network (WN), and that they and the hunting philosopher, Roger Scruton, had held some meetings at which it was proposed that with suitable reforms, especially of terrier work, they could agree that there was a good deal to be said for fox hunting from the point of view both of fox welfare and fox conservation.

It is important to see that animal welfare and conservation are not the same thing. Welfare applies to individual animals: it is a matter of whether they are suffering or not.

Conservation happens to groups: it is a matter of whether, overall, there is a thriving population of the species. Animal populations can be managed, for instance, so that humans cause gross suffering to individuals in the population, but the population as a whole thrives. Conversely, one might ensure that one inflicted no suffering on any individual animal, but so manage the population that it declined and even became extinct.

In the case of fox hunting, one might argue - Wildlife Network and others do - that it is a (quite or very) bad thing in welfare terms for the hunted individuals, but the management system of which hunting is a part might be wonderful or at least preferable for fox conservation. The position might be complicated - it is in this case - by the view that hunting with hounds may be definitely bad in welfare terms but the alternative to it probably no better, even in welfare terms. In other words, this new and rather reluctant pro-hunting view holds that in both welfare and conservation terms, fox-hunting may be preferable to the likely alternatives.

In short, fox hunting might be a bad thing in welfare terms but a good thing in conservation terms, but if what would take its place would be worse in both, then moderates, who did not have to agree on just how bad fox hunting was, could see the point in agreeing to fend off a ban on hunting. WN threw its weight against the Foster Bill, which proposed in 1997 to outlaw hunting with hounds. The bill fell, eventually, because it is hard for private members' bills to succeed in the face of any serious opposition, however few its opponents may be. Tony Blair has since declared (in July 1999), almost casually, and to the surprise of all parties, that a ban of hunting remains high on his list of priorities. No-one knows how serious his intentions are.
I knew that WN had commissioned a close friend of mine, Charles Pye-Smith, to write an unbiased account of fox-hunting. He did so, in terms largely supportive of the new Barrington case. In 1998 Charlie was also asked to write an account of hare hunting (but not of hare coursing) for the WN, and did so in terms which again stressed that removing hunting with dogs would probably do little for hare conservation or welfare and might even damage both.
Charlie's journalistic tasks were relatively simple, as mine is. Our job is to make some inquiries and review the evidence on our subjects. Charlie was pretty firm in supporting the WN position on fox and hare hunting, but his support could be seen, as it were, to arise from the evidence he heard and reported. He did not have to discover or invent a case which no-one had heard before. His opinion, when he came to it, was a pretty ordinary sort of opinion, held by many people who know the subjects in hand quite well. In other words, his opinion did not matter nearly so much as did the fact that he came to it after hearing - and passing on - the opinion of people far more knowledgeable (and committed) than he.
It is a curious and depressing feature of modern cultural life that the idea of the ordinarily fair-minded person has gone by the board. We are all supposed to have rampant agendas and interests, and it is supposed that these will contribute to our mind-sets, and these will all gang up and determine what we think and how we argue. This is never more so than when dealing any issue involving animals. All we know about animals is that we cannot ask them what they think or feel, and this of course makes it terribly important that people make a stab at working out what it is that animals think or feel.
It is obviously very important to know where people "are coming from" when you read their account of evidence and opinions on any issue. But it is also important to see that Charlie, say, is unlikely to come to deeply eccentric or perverse opinions about anything, and that this is so because he prides himself on a certain sort of reasonableness which he takes to be normal, frankly, to most British people.
He also likes evidence, and likes to be true to it. It is, for instance, very unlikely indeed that a man like Charlie would hide evidence, or wilfully understate or overstate the significance of any evidence he came across. I know this because I know him: but I also can guess it because I know the kinds of books he has written and the kinds of journals that publish his work. I also know it from reading his pamphlets on fox and hare hunting. Either he is a consummate actor and dissembler, or what he says is reasonable and fair. That does not mean it is gospel.
I say all this because it strikes me as important to stress that most non-hunting people reading Charlie's accounts of fox and hare hunting would almost certainly come to the subject holding the ordinary majority view (that these activities are cruel, unnecessarily and indefensible) but that many will go away from having read his booklets and say something like: Well, that was interesting; and this apparently balanced and certainly unhysterical account leads me to suppose that worse things may happen to foxes and hares if hunting were to be banned than if hunting were allowed to continue. That person might reprise Charlie's arguments: it may be very hard to stop farmers killing foxes and hares by means more cruel and more thorough than happen when hunting was allowed. The landowners' and farmers' tolerance of foxes will be reduced, and their willingness to trap, gas and shoot the animals greatly increased. In the case of hares, landowners and farmers may feel it will be best to be rid of them altogether since their presence, in the absence of the hunt, attracts hooligans who hunt the animals viciously and create social difficulties too.
These arguments are not watertight. They depend on a prediction of what would actually happen, in the absence of Parliamentary will to impose, and police willingness and ability to enforce, new laws (as yet not envisaged, let alone proposed) to stop it. One could accept the force of these arguments and still believe such hunting should be outlawed and an altogether different approach to controlling but conserving foxes, and conserving hares, be discovered later. All the same, the arguments will appeal to some of us because they tie in well with the desire, if at all possible, to preserve hunting.
The point here is that there are no arguments for or against hunting, or for or against the bill to ban hunting, which are absolute and definitive. I, for instance, can live with the animal suffering involved in fox hunting and hare hunting because I think it is quite slight, not worse than nature inflicts on animals anyway, and because in the real world it seems that for control and conservation reasons the thing works rather well.
And of course, the sport gives pleasure, which I approve of. If something unpleasant must happen to one creature (the fox, the hare, the deer), I am inclined - in direct opposition to many, especially many on the left - to believe that it is a good thing if it provides sport to people as well. At the margin, I think some of the suffering is justified by human pleasure rather than rendered less excusable. So those were some of things I thought and felt as I read Charlie's account of fox and hare hunting.
When it came to be my turn to be approached by Barrington, the situation was a little different. He wanted an account of stag-hunting, more properly called deer hunting, since the few English hunts of this kind (three of them all in one small area of the West country) hunt animals of both sexes. Ideally, he wanted an account of the character Charlie had given him of the other two sports, but coming in this case to the reverse of Charlie's conclusions in those. This was highly reasonable of Barrington. The business of deer welfare and conservation is different to that of fox and hare welfare and conservation. Indeed, it is plausible to say they are in important respects mirror images of each other.
So, ideally, my account of deer hunting would chime with Barrington's. This account would have said that stag hunting was what its opponents claimed: too cruel to countenance.
I told him that, on the contrary, every prejudice I had was in favour of the hunting being allowed to continue and that it would be a sad day for me if after looking at the evidence I came to the conclusion that the sport's opponents were right. I told him for good measure that I was writing an account of the fur trade which was in favour of its unharrassed continuance and that I thought the Maria Eagle private member's bill to outlaw fur farming was a nonsense. But his project was an interesting one, I said, and if he'd let me trawl the evidence, I would willingly do so. After all, my conclusions would not matter very much, and he would be welcome to publish my account of the evidence with his conclusions argued from it, if he liked.
This is important. Producing fair accounts of evidence is a very different matter from drawing conclusions from them even though, as I have argued, we should try to make our conclusions flow as naturally as possible from the evidence we have in front of us. I would be happy if on so contentious issue as stag hunting we did at least give readers a decent account of the arguments. People would come to their own conclusions anyway, whatever mine or Barrington's were.
This is especially true, I think, in the case of stag hunting. It seems to me that the evidence about deer hunting is that it is the cruellest thing we do to wild animals. It is also perhaps unnecessary, since it could be replaced with a system of population control which many believe would be far preferable.
But I also find it an acceptable and even laudable practice which Parliament should not ban.
The rest of this pamphlet will lay out evidence as best as we have it on these matters, and declare some opinions which have to go well beyond any evidence we actually have. That is the nature of writing about animals, whatever our longing to be strictly reasonable. In the case of the booklet's account of the Bateson Report, Patrick Bateson has some objections to what I have written and sooner than try to reconcile the irreconcilable in the text, I have simply appended his comments (Appendix 1).
This is the moment when one declares one's interests. I am being paid to write these words, but my paymasters would prefer a conclusion I am not likely to come to. I do, of course, find a small commercial advantage in being controversial. What's worse, I enjoy it. But I have a stronger interest in being thought reasonable and interesting. And - you will have to take my word on this because it is a hard thing to prove - I feel deeply passionate that debate is this country's greatest single product and I long above all to be thought to contribute to its quality as well as its liveliness.
I have never hunted a land animal, not even as a boy when it is the most natural thing in the world. I have done a bit of sea fishing, especially as boy, and now do so for a few minutes a year, when I generally rather surprise my companions by knocking anything we catch on the head rather merely let it "drown" in air. But this is a messy business of doubtful efficacy and I soon give it up. I prefer steering the boat to fishing from it.
I have gone out, unarmed, on a pheasant shoot with a friend, and quite enjoyed being along for the walk and the lunch. As a young man, I once misled a pack of hounds near Tiverton, in order (as I thought it) to prolong if I could not actually preserve the life of the fox-cub in question. I am squeamish, unenergetic and cowardly, and these qualities (or lack of them) make it unlikely that I shall ever ride or run in any sort of hunt, or lift a rifle or shotgun. I am prone to those Clint Eastwood moments when one would love to be able to invite some punk to "make my day", and would occasionally love to be strong enough generally to lay down the law with a fist, knife or gun. But the moments pass and I doubt I have any more of them than anyone else. I am not particularly blood thirsty.
All the same, I am wholly in favour of hunting with hounds, and all the other forms of legal hunting done in this country by the thousands who enjoy them (millions if you include angling). I would count it a bad day's work if the Queen ever has to sign on to the statute book a bill outlawing them. My enthusiasm for hunting (and fishing) flows from my liking for such hunters and shooters as I have met. They seem very likeably to understand one very satisfactory version of how life must be lived: to the full, as an adventure, in company with others, with a respect for tradition, in the open air (especially in winter). I also approve of them: that people should learn hunting skills and display hunting courage seems to me a part of what makes the human tapestry vibrant. I like the hauteur of riders on horseback: I like the way they look down on the rest of us. I love the high-spirits of the mounts though I am very frightened of horses and have only enjoyed riding them when too drunk to think or sit straight.
What is more, I dislike and disapprove of the stereotypical extreme anti's, who are not the universal model of those opposed to the hunt but are common enough to be real. I don't like their version of class warfare; I don't like their populist appeal to the apathetic mass of people who will proclaim opinions, and cast votes, on matters about which they have not the modesty to admit they know nothing and are likely to be wrong. I loath the growing habit of opinionating and legislating on issues purely on the basis of untutored emotionalism rather than leaving other people and their habits alone if one possibly can. I disapprove of, and dislike, the anti's for effortlessly believing in changing society because one believes it is immoral. I do not characterise the debate as being between hard-working, tax-paying people who hunt and nay-saying, whinging, fringe-types and spongers. I know this characterisation of the debate has elements of the truth about it. But actually many of even the extreme anti's either do now or will soon contribute taxes and work hard. All the same I disapprove of them because I do incline to the view that their pleasure in stopping people having pleasure is at least as suspect as the forms of pleasure they are trying to stop.
And now to turn to the hunt, which is where we should perhaps have begun in the first place.

Chapter One: going out with the hunt
The first shock about stag-hunting is to see how extraordinarily popular it is. It only takes place in one small corner of England, on Exmoor and the neighbouring Quantocks, but it is a wild and beautiful corner which boasts traffic jams of a positively urban kind on hunt days. All about is the evidence of £30,000 of income to the region that is thought to attach to each hunted deer. On the two days I spent following the Devon and Somerset Stag Hounds, there must have been upwards of a 150 horse trailers and horse boxes lining every available verge near the meet (the 11 am gathering of riders, hounds, hunt staff and spectators with which each hunting day begins). As the day wore on, there was a striking amount of confusion as streams of vehicles passed and re-passed each other in pursuit of the action. This is four wheel drive heaven: there are more Land Rovers and jeeps and Land Cruisers out on the high lanes of Exmoor on hunt days than there are outside fashionable primary schools in London suburbs in term time.
The hunt had returned my initial phone call with something like enthusiasm. They knew Jim Barrington and wanted to participate in this study. Yes, they knew that Barrington's limited enthusiasm for fox hunting did not extend to deer hunting, but if they got a fair account of their activity, that would suit them they said. Come down, they added, and we'll see if Tom Rook will show you the action. If there's anything to see, he'll find it. If there's anything to explain, he can explain it.
And so on the appointed Saturday, I was introduced to Tom. He told me to enjoy the meet and then we'd be off. Diana Scott, the hunt master, cruised by on a mighty looking horse. Diana was what you'd expect: handsome, commanding, confident. Just be fair, she called down at me: "But we've been stitched up before, so we won't be surprised if you're no better than the others".
The scene was what you'd expect. Amongst the crowd, whether on or off horses, the old fashioned accents of the gentry were mingled with the softer burr of the yeoman farmers and the downright rusticity of the less well-off. Everyone knew everyone else and there was a good deal of laughter and socialising as equipment was readied. I marvelled, as usual, at how everyone at these events loves to be well-turned out, though the day will destroy all the preparations.
There was bright sunshine and bitter cold. The horses were flighty and dramatic, apparently longing for action. It was the kind of scene to grate on the nerves of people who wish England was wholly free of class, entirely rational and generally more worried about, well, everything, than England can actually be bothered to be.
In a large closed horse box, the handful of hounds which were to go ahead and flush out the quarry deer were being selected from their fellows. As they were let out, some hunt staff - men - were roaring with laughter and one of them was doing up his fly. I had the impression that he had relieved himself on the dogs, or at least very close to them. But I might be wrong and on reflection I couldn't care less. Presumably the dogs wouldn't have minded much, and that's what matters. Still, the hunt staff were men who seemed vigorous and tough. I admired then, as I have often admired, the courage of those anti's who risk coming up against such people away from the comforting protection of a crowd, or the recording eye of a video camera. When their blood is up, and their interests and livelihood threatened, some of these hunt staff (and plenty others amongst the hunt's supporters) might surely be determined adversaries. Equally, of course, some of the anti's are pretty fierce too. Doubtless, they are well met.
I was bundled into Tom's newish but nicely scruffy Land Rover, and we led rather than followed the stream of vehicles over the next few hours. Rook is the hunt vice-chairman, a mainstay of its organisation and a local auctioneer. He is a key figure in the local economy as well as in its main sport. He makes no claim to being posh: quite the reverse. He is stocky, solid, quiet and generous to those who pull their weight for the hunt. I would say that the hunt is his very lifeblood: it is his daily and hourly passion and pre-occupation. But he doesn't hate the anti's. On one of my visits he went over to the four wheel drive occupied by the League Against Cruel Sports driver and video-operator. It was too close to the entrance of a dry stone enclosure the hunt were using: he remonstrated briefly with the occupants. It wasn't that they were just there: that Rook accepts as inevitable. It was that this was a bit of behaviour that was outside the rules of engagement: not importantly so, just irritatingly not what works in the awkward accommodation Rook seems to accept must exist between those who love, and those who hate, the hunt.
I did not make many notes as Tom Rook drove in pursuit of the deer, hounds, riders, and followers. The Land Rover was bouncing too much for that. When we stopped, I was too cold and too busy drinking coffee. But Tom's message was simple enough. The hounds do not kill deer. Deer are shot by hunt staff or designated hunt riders when, at the end of the chase, they have "had enough", and they turn to confront their pursuers. This moment is when the hounds hold the deer "at bay".
I don't know much this behaviour mimics what deer would once have done whilst being pursued by wolves. It is certainly claimed that pursuit by man's hounds is very different to pursuit by nature's wolves. Hounds bred by humans have huge endurance as well as a good deal of pace. It is widely claimed and widely accepted that humans organise deer hunts so as to produce much longer and faster chases than wolves could manage. It is often claimed that the human hunt picks the best and strongest animals to chase; the wolf, the feeblest. It wants a long chase, the wolf a short one. Tom Yandle, the hunt's chairman and a local farmer, says, "That would be indefensible if that's what we did. We select deer for many reasons, perhaps because they're sick, old or wounded. Sometimes our choice produces a long hunt. But we never deliberately target animals because of their strength. A pack of hounds will always prefer to hunt a weak animal."
For his part, Tom Rook doesn't theorise very much about the justification for the hunt. He believes landowners tolerate high numbers of deer on their land because of their pleasure in the hunt and he believes the hunt is not very cruel. He accepts that deer possibly do suffer, and he takes no pleasure in the suffering as such. But he believes that they do not suffer very much or unacceptably. He probably believes - surely most hunt people do - that such suffering as they endure is warranted, granted that the existence of many of them depends, in effect, on the hunt.
As the day wore on, it was clear that the hounds were chasing various animals at different times, but had not found any one deer to pursue to the death. Deer have myriad strategies with which to confuse hounds. They merge with large groups of their fellows, so as to throw off pursuit. They head for water so as to disguise their scent. They head for bracken, which the hounds hate hunting in. And so on. Both days I was there, the hounds did in the end find a single animal and did pursue it to and fro for a hour or so until finally, out of sight, the beast did what most deer do: they find water, or a fence, or a wood, and they turn and face their oppressors. At this point, the deer will be exhausted. It would rather, one supposes, turn and fight, or turn and die. But it cannot, or will not, push itself any longer in the business of running.
Exhaustion is a peculiar business. I saw horses much closer up than I saw deer, those two Saturdays. The horses I saw at the beginning of the day were in a state of high excitement. They were animals who presumably could more or less remember what had happened last time they were out hunting, which is why they got excited when the prospect was before them again. Perhaps like their riders they were so excited that the memory of that last fall was conveniently forgotten. Perhaps the pain of their extraordinary exertions over several hours earlier in the week (a very few occasionally hunt on all three weekly hunting days) had already been forgotten. Perhaps horses are, like many humans, deeply optimistic creatures, and simply remember the exhilaration of the hunt but not its pains and woes. Whatever of these explanations apply, the fact is that the animals were excited and willing participants in the hunt early in the day, and at the end of it, they were surely extremely tired. But then, so were the hounds, which one also saw close up, and some of which looked a deal less bushy-tailed than they had earlier.
Now of course, an animal rights person probably believes that the horse and the hounds suffer unacceptably, along with their quarry.
And surely, they would add, as anyone might, there is a difference between the tiredness of a hunted animal, which faces death and is in some state of terror, and the excited, satisfactory exhaustion of an animal - human or not - which is in pursuit and has found and triumphed over its enemy. So let's now see if we can see things through the eyes of the deer, the point of all this glamorous and dramatic activity.

Chapter Two: the evidence of suffering
Doreen Cronin (who we shall meet again later, in Chapter Four), of West Quantoxhead, was one of the first to raise the issue of stag hunting with the National Trust, which owns a large minority (10 percent) of the land on Exmoor. Once the campaign gathered steam, the Trust had to take an interest in the matter, and found that its first lines of defence were inadequate to it. At first the Trust argued that its tenants must have the right to pursue any legal activity consistent with the Trust's aims, which did not include going further than Parliament had in deciding on issues of animal welfare. Secondly, it had received a good deal of its property from owners who had insisted that sporting rights on the land be maintained.
Eventually, the Trust faced such vociferous protest that it had to commission, first the Savage Report (1993)[early nineties] , which dealt mostly with conservation of deer, and then - much more controversially - the Bateson Report (1997). This report appeared at first to be incontrovertibly authoritative: few non-specialists would willingly argue against the experience and authority of its author, Professor Patrick Bateson, Provost of King's College, Cambridge and a Fellow of the Royal Society. When a knowledgeable and experienced scientist, who has worked on animal welfare issues, pronounces as firmly as he did in this report that hunting was certainly cruel and unacceptable, that seems like the end of the matter.
Patrick Bateson is professor of ethology at the University of Cambridge's zoology department, of which he has also been head. For the deer hunting study, he corralled together a small team of researchers, guided by a slightly larger number of experts on a Scientific Panel, to work with him, and was closely assisted by Elizabeth Bradshaw, a zoologist and ethologist. Elizabeth Bradshaw spent over a year watching the hunt, and testing the blood and muscle of hunted deer. Bateson manifestly brought together some of the brightest minds in animal welfare thinking, including, for instance Marian Dawkins (who has pioneered the art of investigating what animals want), and John Webster, Professor of animal husbandry at Bristol University. He included Donald Broom, the country's only professor of animal welfare, also at Cambridge. However, Professor Bateson does not claim that the report is in any way a consensus one: the conclusions are his own and he did not call on his experts to comment on its drafting. It might have saved a good deal of controversy if there had been wider and more formal consultation. At the time when the decisions about the nature of Bateson's inquiry were taken, however, it was felt that the merits of having a single author and a clear result outweighed those of indulging in what was felt, probably rightly, to be a hopeless quest for unanimity of opinion.
All this may be taken to mean that Professor Bateson's report stood little chance of being the last word in the matter, or even the best word we might have had. The report declares that the "atmosphere surrounding the team's work was of course charged": 30-odd pages of discussion was unlikely to be thought comprehensive or conclusive.
Patrick Bateson is an amiable man with the self-confidence necessary to be an academic high flyer. Even so, the confidence of his report is a little surprising granted that it can declare, for instance, "Studying animal welfare scientifically is still in its early stages and very little work has been done in the field on what happens to animals that have been hunted. We had to develop many of the methods that we used with very little to guide us. We also had to work quickly. Two years from conceiving a scientifically project to producing a final report may seem a long time to the layman. But in practice it was a tough assignment to gather the necessary data and analyse what we obtained in the time that was available to us. I believe, however, that we have obtained a clear result.... We really did not know what we were going to find. As always in science, we failed to find some things that we had expected to find and we uncovered some major surprises which nobody had foreseen. Inexorably we were lead (sic) to certain conclusions. I hope those who will undoubtedly dislike these conclusion will accept that we have arrived at them honestly and, in some respects, not without sadness".
The report says: "The study produced clear cut scientific results. These show that lengthy hunts with hounds impose extreme stress on red deer and are likely to cause them great suffering. The hunts force them to experience conditions far outside the normal limits for their species". The conclusion was that suffering would be reduced if deer hunting with hounds ceased because the suffering inflicted by shooting, and even by shooting that went awry occasionally, would be far less.
The report delivered, the Trust accepted it and banned hunting on its land.
In detail, the report finds that hunted deer quite often face the distress of close contact with humans. This is true, and importantly so. The hunted deer come across traffic, they sometimes come across foot followers who try to head them off from undesirable routes (say toward National Trust land where hunting is banned). At the end of the hunt, deer will sometimes seek sanctuary in running water, where they may end up being wrestled by followers or being snapped at close quarters by pursuing hounds.
The report found that, however obviously tired, deer kept on cantering in the same way - intermittently - throughout the hunt (that is: "tiring animals exerted themselves maximally until the end"). The average deer had travelled about 12 miles and each hunt had lasted about three hours. (Giving an average pace about equal to that of walking adult human.) Levels of various hormones indicating stress rose, and are discussed in the report at some length. There was no direct evidence from the study of what happens to hunted deer which escape but "the available literature" was cited to suggest "eventual recovery probably occurred in the majority of the deer but also that prolonged stress might weaken the immune system, making the deer more susceptible to disease."
The report stressed that the deer, contrary to received opinion, is not a natural athlete, travelling huge distances and highly adapted by evolution to the sort of hunting it now endures: rather, it is "sedentary" and the deer adapted if at all to being hunted by wolves which would hunt with "short athletic leaps and dashes or by hiding".
There are three main areas in which the Bateson report has come under academic fire. One is that it takes a very old-fashioned view about the indicators which can be taken to prove animal suffering. Roughly speaking, the report uses the levels of the "fight or flight" hormone, cortisol, as a sufficient measure of stress, and stress as a sufficient measure of suffering. The difficulty here that any serious review of animal suffering, and in this context especially the responses of animals to fear, now has to take into account the knowledge that cortisol is not a hormone which unequivocally indicates, say, terror. It is a hormone of excitement, and will be present in high quantities when an animal is excited in pleasurable anticipation just as when it is excited in terror. What is more, sophisticated modern discussion of animal suffering depends on considering not merely the fact that, say, cortisol, is present at high levels, but also for how long it is present, and - crucially - what the animal can do about the circumstances in which it finds itself. Professor Bateson acknowledges some of these complicating factors, but does not seem to believe that they leave much room for real dispute.
There is another element of fear and hard work which Bateson barely discusses. This is the way in which the release of "fear" hormones is closely allied to the release of mood-affecting hormones such as beta-endorphins. This phenomenon is dealt with in a line or two at a couple of different places in the report, in which it is greatly out-distanced by space given to hormones such as cortisol. This is odd because we know that human victims of extreme events are crucially saved from experiencing them in full by alleviatory hormonal effects. Why should hunted deer not be in the same saving state of shock, excitement and even euphoria, as well as terror?
Discussing this sort of issue, Professor Webster, in his full and compassionate account of animal welfare3, makes various very relevant remarks:

Some years ago I examined a thesis which described a study of 'transport stress' in veal calves. An early experiment demonstrated a significant elevation in plasma cortisol concentration in these calves during transportation and this was taken to indicate that the calves were stressed (and suffered) while in transit. However, a subsequent experiment revealed an even greater elevation in cortisol concentration when the calves received their twice-daily feeds of milk replacer. This was attributed to the excitement (and pleasure) of feeding.

The word stress can .... be used in a specific sense, to define the 'general adaptation syndrome', an expression first used by Hans Selye to describe common features of the response of animals to a wide range of physical or psychological stimuli which he called 'stressors'. The response of .... Animals....to stressors such as fear, will first be one of alarm.... then proceed towards adaptation. However, if the intensity or duration of the stressor exceeds the capacity of the animal to adapt, the response will proceed to the third stage, that of exhaustion. In the initial alarm phase, the animal will increase secretion of hormones from the adrenal cortex (e.g. cortisol) and ..... adrenaline. These hormones are designed to condition the animal for immediate action by switching the flow of blood and nutrients from long-term goals like growth towards immediate problems like flight or fight. Since increased secretion of adreno-cortical hormones, typically cortisol, is a constant feature of the alarm response, concentrations of cortisol in the blood or saliva of animals are regularly read as a so-called 'objective' index of stress. However, this approach not only fails to differentiate between physiological and psychological stimuli to the alarm response ..... but it can also fail to distinguish between alarm as a potential source of suffering, and excitement as a potential source of pleasure.

Implicit in ......in Selye' s original concept of the general adaptation syndrome .... is the premise that most animals can cope with most acute physical or mental stresses but chronic stress ultimately becomes exhausting and this abuses welfare because the animal not only fails to sustain fitness but suffers from a progressively greater sense of malaise.

If an animal is repeatedly exposed to ...... situations in which it cannot take action to .... reduce its fear, or is prevented from taking action, or does not know what action to take, then acute fear may proceed through chronic anxiety to the condition called learned helplessness by animal psychologists but which corresponds closely to chronic pathological depression in man. In these circumstances animals and humans lose appetite, body condition, curiosity and the motivation to control their immediate environment. Whereas acute fear, in moderation, may be healthy and instructive, chronic anxiety or depression must be considered a profound form of suffering.

None of this should be taken to imply that animals love all stress, or that pumping cortisol is fun. It does, though, make the point that "suffering" arises from stress only if the stress is intense, prolonged and unavoidable.
Taken together, these insights help one to see why Bateson's opponents believe that his analysis is simplistic. A fellow Cambridge academic, Dr Douglas Wise4, especially, supposes that in their early phases hunts trigger alarm, certainly, but cannot be described as producing oppressive, continuous, prolonged and inescapable stress. "Until the final phases a deer who has been hunted before and has escaped, or a deer being hunted for the first time, has every expectation of fairly easily outpacing the hounds", he says. Indeed, if this is so, it is even possible to argue that the hunted deer is free even in the dramatic minutes before its death of some of the worst excesses of fear and stress. After all, by the time tiredness and perhaps terror take over, there is little time left for the deer. The deer hunted to death is spared prolonged suffering in a way which few animals or humans are, but above all, it has no prolonged, crippling or depressing expectation of death.
This fits well with the picture of very slight "background" anxiety which the deer might be presumed to experience. It is not contested that Red deer, even in populations regularly hunted, are composed of animals which do not show high levels of cortisol at rest. In other words, these are animals which are not showing high levels of anxiety or excitement.
This fits with what we might suppose of free-living deer, even if they have periodically been hunted but escaped. Discussing animals in general, Webster remarks5:

I believe that non-human animals do not suffer chronic, existential fears of inevitable future distress, such as ageing, incapacity and death. They are also spared the anxiety which we may feel when we read or hear of threats of which we have no personal experience.

Professor Bateson has many critics, and they have mostly come together under the banner of the Countryside Alliance (which has replaced the British Field Sports Society). Unfortunately, the discussion between the two sides has become acrimonious, and perhaps more on the pro-hunting side than on Bateson's. Be that as it may, a paper by Professor Roger Harris and four fellow authors (known as the Joint Universities, or JU, study6), and citing over a hundred academic references, can surely be called a serious piece of work. More controversially, but also more comprehensibly, Douglas Wise (a Cambridge University lecturer) has brought together many of the same strands of argument. Taken together, these new reports can claim to have gone head-to-head with Professor Bateson's arguments. I favour the critics' view over Bateson's. But it is more important to see that a proper decision on deer-hunting can't really be taken until all three reports have been bounced thoroughly - and expertly - against each other.
The critics suggest that deer, like other hunted animals, are not necessarily suffering emotionally or psychologically when they respond to the alarming presence of hounds or any other predator. The deer get very excited, and they want to put some distance between themselves and the predator. They exert themselves to do so. But these critics point out that deer appear to have no difficulty in achieving these ends, at least in the majority of phases of a normal hunt.
In the words of the JU study:

We would suggest that the onset of volitional exhaustion, defined as the point when the animal feels the desire to stop, a need which intensifies as the hunt continues, is not a linear process with time but occurs exponentially over the final minutes.

Professor Bateson stresses (see Appendix 1) that there are changes in the blood of hunted deer which suggest that even early in the hunt, the deer may be suffering. If this is so, it does not seem evident from casual observation on the ground.

The JU study:

For most deer, the pattern of pursuit and escape are repeated, driven by the scenting ability of the hounds (who may not see the deer until the final stages). Inevitably some pursuits will involve more strenuous exercise than others but always below a level of fatigue where deer might be caught. During long hunts, the overall pattern of exercise is likely to be erratic and energetically expensive for the deer, leading to partial and then total depletion of the muscle glycogen stores in the locomotory muscles.

[Depletion of muscle glycogen is what leads any athlete to "hit the wall": experiencing pain and exhaustion.]

As the effort of escape rises, deer are likely to seek territorial advantage before turning to bay, or alternatively in a few instances they may attempt to hide. The strategy employed by the hunt, that of gradual attrition of the deer, is the only one available to a predator pursuing a prey which (initially at least) has a much greater running ability.

Douglas Wise summarises the JU position in these words:

In summary, the JU scientists argue that, except for athletically compromised animals or occasional, unusual circumstances, hounds cannot bring deer to account unless they have first brought them to a state of glycogen depletion. Until this occurs, hunted deer will have no athletic difficulty in coping and early and intermediate escape responses usually end because of lack of perceived threat. Once volitional exhaustion occurs the hunted animals will wish to stop and will do so unless hounds are close. As soon as hounds do get close to a glycogen depleted deer, it is very unlikely to escape and its despatch is generally prompt. The period of physical difficulty in coping is thus short. The distance covered before volitional exhaustion will vary greatly according to the proportion of anaerobic to total exercise which, in turn, will be influenced by terrain and by scenting conditions.

The JU scientists consider that any hunted deer that is obliged to exercise beyond the point of glycogen depletion will experience unpleasant feelings of fatigue which could be defined as suffering. Two points should be noted, however. Many marathon runners experience similar feelings which they willingly repeat and thus they cannot realistically be regarded as aversive. Secondly, not all hunted deer are exercised past the point of volitional exhaustion. Five of the 36 of the hunted deer in the JU study were shot while in hiding with hounds not close. Added to the feeling of fatigue, however, in a deer that is exercised beyond the point of volitional exhaustion may be one of inescapable fear which, indeed, were it to occur in man, would certainly be aversive. At this stage, the deer can no longer outpace hounds and has no chance of escape. Whether it has the cognitive ability to appreciate this cannot, of course, be known. Furthermore, the almost certainly high levels of centrally-acting beta endorphins which could be anticipated in a strenuously exercised animal may well mitigate suffering at this stage. In any event, provided a hunt gun is quickly on the scene when hounds sight a glycogen depleted deer, death will almost always follow in a matter of minutes. Suffering prior to the point of volitional exhaustion, which represents a sudden and exponential increase in the feeling of fatigue, is very unlikely. The hunted deer will probably be well ahead of hounds but, if not, will have glycogen reserves which will enable it readily to outpace them, something that its past experience will have given it confidence in its ability to do. It is thus coping well, having control of over its own mental and physical function and, in a sense, controlling also the tactics of the hunt. It will have no knowledge of impending glycogen exhaustion and, with it the loss of its superior pace.

What do we know about recovery-times in humans and other animals? Mostly we know that creatures can undergo quite extreme exercise and tremendous levels of anxiety and stress and recover quite soon. The hunting set on Exmoor were dismayed when they read that Bateson's team believed that somehow a hunted deer which escapes might be thought likely to continue to suffer, or have diminished health, thereafter. Hunted animals which escape, I was told again and again on Exmoor, were found at their customary feeding and resting areas within hours of the apparently severe and debilitating experience they had endured. The Bateson report suggested that perhaps 60 animals a year were hunted very hard and then escaped, and that perhaps 12 percent of these might - according to the sole literature reference (one dealing with very different circumstances) called in aid of this part of argument - actually die. This implies that perhaps seven animals a year die on Exmoor from the effects of being chased to extremes. "That is not a large number for an area of considerable size", the report comments. No, and it is not a large number of deaths to result from what is after all supposed to be a means of killing animals. Surely, however, if there were animals of this size staggering about waiting to die, someone would have noticed? There are people assiduously out and about searching for antlers, there are masses of walkers, there are farmers going about their business. Surely in all the substantial literature on the red deer of Exmoor we would by now have had some hint that this sort of occurrence is there to be reported?
Instead what we read is the testimony that deer return to their normal habits very quickly after being hunted, and in this they are like race horses, hunters, marathon runners and all the other creatures we see undergoing exercise, and even severe exercise. Bateson's critics cite quite a large range of literature to argue that he is simply wrong in his reading of how extreme is the average hunted deer's physical experience, and of the longterm consequences which will flow from it.
Harris has this to say on the matter:

The study that is perhaps the most analogous to the present investigation in deer is that of US marine recruits undergoing their basic training (Demos et al 1974). A prospectively-studied group had mean CK levels of 2500 (maximum I0,000) without muscle pain or myglobinuria (it should be noted that muscle mass involvement, relative to circulation volume, will be very much less in bipeds compared to exercising deer). A separate group of marine recruits, hospitalised for exertional myoglobinuria, with a mean S-CK of 76,000 (range 76,000 to I09,000), all recovered within 14 days. These data suggest that the S-CK values in the present study are generally modest, do not indicate massive immediate muscle damage and would be associated with full recovery of function in due course.

The hunt argues that this is even true of the extreme situations. There was a classic case a few years ago when a deer jumped onto a lean-to and was photographed skidding about on the slates. He eventually jumped down and ran off, and seen a couple of days later minding his own business amongst his herd of hinds at his usual pasture. There was a national outcry, but the deer seems to have been none the worse for its experience. Indeed, jumping up on to such a bit of high ground is classic deer behaviour when hunted.
There is of course an alternative to hunting by hounds. Left to themselves, deer numbers will multiply, and they are already held in check by a far more efficient method of culling than the hunt. Around 85 per cent of the deer which man deliberately kills on Exmoor every year are killed by people carrying rifles or shotguns, and [many] the majority of them are in fact shot by the hunt's own staff. There is a certain amount of poaching, but this can be assumed to be a fairly small component of the killing, granted that Exmoor is small enough and populous enough for illegal and unpopular activity to be discovered and condemned.
Perhaps a third of animals which are shot die instantaneously, and the majority will die a relatively quick death, and one which probably causes less suffering than hunting. There seems to be general acceptance that perhaps 5 per cent of shot animal suffer very greatly.
In the minds of Professor Bateson and those who support his general view, that suffering would have to be set against the considerable suffering of the alternative, hunting with hounds. To the Harris-minded, the suffering through shooting is perhaps the only very serious suffering the culling of deer produces. Edmund Marriage, of British Wildlife management, has described this balance in a calculus, in which the animal-hours of "recoverable" or "non-recoverable" suffering are balanced against each other. In his view they weigh heavily against stalking with guns. In my own mind, the occasional disastrous outcome for a deer through shooting probably more or less matches the misery of the occasional hound-hunted deer.
Interestingly, shooting is the commonest present method of culling Exmoor's 2,500-odd deer. It is thought the herd must be reduced by 500 animals a year to maintain its present stability. The hunt accounts for roughly 150 annually (75 hunted with hounds, and around 75 casualty animals despatched). Probably a further 250 deer are shot by farmers and landowners, which leaves about 100 unaccounted for, perhaps taken *we don't know about, poachers or reticent locals), its occurrence would not have to be much stepped up to replace the hounds' current toll. "no-one has ever seen a caraccess from old age or starvation/....which I think is a very telling point

However, as we shall see, the role of the hunt as stalkers and rifle-men in killing wounded animals is an important consideration, and it is a legitimate worry as to whether the hunt's quick-despatch work could easily be replicated if the hunt's main pleasure - riding to hounds - were outlawed.
Where does this leave us? We know, and we know it more systematically than usual because of Patrick Bateson's report, that deer hunting is a prolonged event, or series of events, whose result is an exhausted animal who has often had some dramatic encounters with humans and whose state of exhaustion and perhaps of despair leads it to make one last stand, whose outcome can be messy and even ghastly for several minutes, but is usually pretty swift. We know that these events are more extreme and prolonged than happen with fox hunting. It seems fair to say that if animals don't like this sort of thing, we would be within our rights to say that the deer's experience, being an extreme version of them, may be worse than any other animal's. What is more, Professor Bateson suggests that good animal welfare depends on giving the animal the benefit of the doubt: this is a bit like writing an open cheque in their favour, but many people would prefer that sort of argument to my tougher inclinations.
We really cannot say that we know anything much about what the deer experiences. There is, for instance, no sign that even adult deer live in dread of the hunt: they seem capable of grazing contentedly provided they are not themselves the active subject of the hunt. Of the hunted animal, we know that it is pumping huge quantities of hormones which make it excited and which in the case of one of the hormones, has the effect of dulling pain. For all we know it may be experiencing a sort of dazed euphoria. It may be in a state of painless shock. It may be in a state of exhilarated hysteria.
The evidence which Bateson produces, and the scientific literature against which he chooses to weigh it, could as easily - and probably with more accuracy - produce an account which said that the deer's experience is manifestly extreme - prolonged, exhausting and alarming - but that it may produce its own somewhat compensating shock or anaesthetising effect. Most of the animals which experience the hunt are killed at the end of it by shooting and of those few which escape, it seems to true to say that most appear wholly unaffected.
Perhaps the most important thing to say about the Bateson Report is that it risks asserting that scientific insights can fairly adroitly be turned into moral ones.

Chapter Three: the irreconcilables
Surely, we are free to say that the opponents of hunting cannot be right when they feel, as Professor Bateson rightly suggests they do in the opening lines of his report: "If you wept as a child at the death of Bambi's mother, you know what it is like to be hunted." Watching a Disney film is about the surest way of being misled about what animals are like. To watch a Disney film is to watch an account of animals which treats those creatures as if they were human, and what's more as if they were a child at a cinema. Besides Bambi was shot, not hunted with hounds.
What matters is that the one thing we know about all this is that we do not know what animals feel when hunted. And this matters because when the hunt's opponents declare that we do, we are very free to say that they have gone well beyond what science - especially the young though important science of animal psycho-pharmacology - could possibly tell us.
Indeed, it is not so much any of the scientific statements in the Bateson Report which matter. It is the report's claim that it reaches "a clear result", and that

what was debatable about suffering is now clear....[and that] the various aspects of the study have produced unusually clear and strong scientific date which have led to the clarification of the relative effects of hunting with hounds and other forms of culling on suffering in red deer.... the implication is that hunting with hounds can push red deer beyond acceptable physiological and behavioural limits and in so doing is likely to cause considerable suffering. Before the study was carried out, it was possible to argue that that views about suffering in hunted deer were subjective and open to debate. This position is, I believe, no longer tenable.

The burden of these passages is that because we know some physiological facts, we can easily move to discussion of suffering, and that we will acquire some insights into suffering which will be a good guide as to what is acceptable or not morally. The Bateson Report is flawed at every step of this road. Its physiological and neurological discussion is useful but far from final. Having established in his own mind that there is deer suffering, Professor Bateson then goes on to declare - as a scientist - that the suffering is unacceptable. Now, Bateson as an individual might be someone we should attend to on the matter of science. But no scientist, merely by virtue of scientific knowledge, is particularly equipped to tell the rest of us what we find acceptable or not, though it is true that is what Trust asked Bateson to do. Those of us who believe that his account of deer suffering makes undue claims for scientific accuracy and certainty, will find it all the easier to be sceptical about his account of the morality of the issue. For his part, Patrick Bateson ripostes: "When one makes a welfare judgement one is starting to ask questions which have to use both moral and scientific judgement, and it's what scientists on committees are often asked to do. And I do think we have rather special competence there."
Leave aside the precise severity of suffering experienced by hunted deer, many people will find the whole business unacceptable because it epitomises cruelty, which most of us define as the deliberate infliction of suffering. The hunt would say they don't set out to cause any suffering, irrespective of what the actual outcome is.
John Webster, as usual, well expresses what a kindly and informed person would be likely to say of the hunt:

If man hunted deer the way that leopards hunt gazelles then the element of enforced suffering, and therefore (in our case) deliberate cruelty, would be small. Unfortunately they don't. The leopard identifies the weakest animal to catch and hunts it down as quickly as possible and with minimum expenditure of energy. If its first choice of prey escapes it will seek another. Hunting deer with hounds is, however, akin to the method .... in the wild by African hunting dogs or a wolf pack. The hunt tends to isolate a stag or hind and hunt it for up to five hours ....... The selected stag discovers that its natural talent for evading predators fails so the stress of fear is prolonged and progressively compounded by an increasing state of exhaustion. The prolonged chase of an individual deer is usually unnecessary and will undoubtedly cause the animal to suffer. It is therefore unnecessary cruelty, and if the deer were a domestic animal it would be criminal. .... They may also argue that on balance the life of the deer is far better than that of, say, the veal calf. They cannot, however, wash their hands of the offence of cruelty. The question I would address to any member of a deerhunt who argues that it is not cruel to pursue and kill a large sentient herbivore, is 'Would you do it to a horse?'

I find that I am with the huntsmen and women in being able to countenance the suffering which deer undergo whilst hunted, and about which I think I may be able to come a better conclusion having read Bateson. I do not think it is as great as Professor Bateson suggests, or rather I think it is mitigated by excitement and shock. I think the report strained to find and promote scientific evidence of the possible severity and unpleasantness of the hunt. I think there are few creatures in the world which have a pleasant death, and that's as true of most humans as it is of most wild animals. Still, I can live with the misery - if that is what it is - which the hunt impose on deer.
But it hardly matters what my prejudice is. We are dealing here with issues on which opinions legitimately differ, and Patrick Bateson has done everyone the service of making it harder to believe that deer take being hunted lightly, that they are bred for it, and so on.
It is very likely that even those people who might see flaws in Bateson's arguments, might then watch a hunt and find - as much on the evidence of their own eyes as on his or any science - that the activity was indeed unacceptable. The debate about hunting is a battle about what human society should be like at least as much as it is about the suffering or otherwise of animals.
Douglas Batchelor has been the chief executive of the League Against Cruel Sports, since May, 1999. Now 53, he has had a career in farm management and consultancy, beginning on Exmoor, where he often saw the deer hunt. He states clearly what is presumably the majority feeling about the hunting. I asked him if he saw an ethical difference between the different forms of hunting with hounds. He replied:

From a moral point of view I think they're both equally reprehensible because you're taking pleasure in a sport which I think is an abuse of a majestic animal, be it a deer or a fox. I recognise that in certain circumstances there is a need to control animal populations and to kill animals. Provided that it's done humanely and quickly by someone with appropriate training I don't have a problem with that. Where I have a problem is when you play with the animal before you despatch it. Do I then draw distinction between, hare or deer or fox? No.
In the control issues all the evidence suggests that the number of animals controlled by the hunt is very small, less than five per cent in fox, and very small in deer. The hare seems to be dying out on its own.
We do recognise the value of hunting in the social fabric and the value of the sport of riding in the countryside and possibly even in the sport and skill of breeding and managing a pack of hounds. But all those can be well employed in well organised drag hunts. Only round about seven per cent of those who have horses or have access to horses ride to hounds. So, there's a vast opportunity here for a big rural enterprise based on the skills but without the cruelty of hunting. Dropping the [element of pursuing a live animal needn't end the skill and pleasure. Unless you enjoy the kill.

Minehead is a small, attractive seaside town which has seen some of the worst things that can happen to hunted deer. Up to thirty or so years ago, deer chased from Exmoor have plunged over Somerset cliffs (so have hounds chasing them). Then, deer struggled down to the shore here, and begin to swim for the open sea, where they drowned, or were shot at sea. Those sorts of situations are memories now. Anyway, it is not surprising that some of the townspeople - perhaps less bound up with rural affairs than their farmer near-neighbours - have taken up the cudgels against the hunt. Only last year, four hounds and a hunted stag entered a school playground at Parracombe, near Lynton in North Devon and caused an outcry, but Tom Yandle says: "This was a mistake and apologised were made an accepted. I pointed out that the stag wasn't touched by the hounds, as was said. It then jumped out of the playground, followed by hounds and went back on to the moor. The whole episode took perhaps a minute and a half."
One Sunday morning I went to Minehead to see Marc Thole. He lives in a pretty old terraced cottage which was remarkably bare of ordinary homely touches, but did boast a large print of a Landseer-sort of stag-on-a-skyline painting.
Marc would probably accept that he is very typical of a certain sort of activist animal-lover. He speaks of a sort of conversion from a mildly supportive curiosity about the hunt, which seemed to embody the countryside and tradition. Something more emotional and involved overcame him and his mother. "My mother loved animals, and she loved tradition, too. But above all, she loved animals, and that's been passed on to me.
"People do feel very emotive about animals. Whatever anyone says, and whatever the hunt throws at us, the thing is that hunting is cruel and there's no way that hunting is acceptable in today's society".
Marc has taken his concern much further than most:

I'm very much into watching deer now. I've got it sussed. I work two days a week, the rest of the time I watch deer. They have become my life. I was a subscriber to the League Against Cruel Sports but I am not now. I still support what they are doing, but I just think that they are going about it the wrong way.
Have I had any trouble with the hunt? Now and again I have. I had some trouble a few years ago. I was out walking my dogs when the hunt came along. I couldn't get out their way and one of them threatened to kill my dogs That happened a couple of times. But I never take the threats seriously. I suppose from an anti-hunting point of view if you don't get threatened by the hunt from time to time, you're not doing your job properly. A friend of mine, Kevin Hill, a hunt monitor, seems to get regularly beaten up by hunt supporters. He is such a nice chap and probably the bravest person I know. Are they really that scared of us?
What do I think of the hunt? I just don't understand them. When you speak to some of them they seem really nice people, but then they go and treat animals this way It's horrible. I cannot understand their point of view. And they cannot understand mine. You can't conserve an animal by being cruel to it. Chasing an animal for ten or twenty miles until it's exhausted is cruel and completely unnecessary. I want to see
a proper management plan put in place with a tagging system and properly trained stalkers who will manage Exmoor's deer.

It seems entirely likely that people out with dogs in deer-hunting country will easily be recognised as being pro- or anti-hunt, and be treated accordingly by the fiercer sort of hunt supporter. All sorts of behaviour - constantly videoing hunt activity from a jeep, for instance, and then campaigning against the hunt - may seem richly provocative to hunting people, just as hunting itself seems richly provocative to those who hate it.
Obviously, the greatest difficulty here is that the competing positions are simply not reconcilable. Whether they are conversationally opposed, or have taken much more violent forms of opposition, the differences of opinion here cannot be resolved by research, wisdom, discussion or anything else. Hunting is immorally cruel to those who oppose it. It is, in the eyes of the hunting types, no more cruel than all sorts of things which happen in nature.
Indeed, it is our relations to nature which are crucially in dispute here. It comes to this. Should we involve ourselves in nature, on its own, absorbing but sometimes violent terms? Or should we rather involve ourselves in it, no less completely perhaps, but seeking to observe it, the better to worship it and learn from it?
The hunting person believes that nature is not polite, perfect, or moral (or least not in human terms): it is wonderful, but it is almost always vigorous, rigorous, unforgiving and very often violent. In this view we pay nature greater respect, and we live more truly to our own natures, when we join the chasing and killing which is the animal way out there. But the opposing view is as sound: it says that our truest natures are involved in a journey which begins in our animal nature and never altogether eschews it, but which adds moral dimensions which allow us to revere the natural, but not be trapped in imitating it.
I do not, by the way, believe that in condoning hunting we are making the same mistake that was made by our forefathers about slaves and women. Without going into the degree to which the white European's treatment of slaves or women was actually a little more defensible than it is usually supposed now, it is manifestly the case that a deer's experience of life is not the same as a person's. Whenever they did not accord full personhood to slaves and women, many of our forebears were denying what in their hearts they knew to be true: that slaves and women had the same sort of feelings and thoughts that the European male did. The case with our treatment with animals is different: many of us believe that we are far freer to inflict suffering on an animal, not because the suffering doesn't matter, but because that creature will endure suffering anyway. It really does not matter very much whether we kill an animal today if we know that it is going to die tomorrow anyway. If it is going to die a horrible death tomorrow, we may even feel justified in hunting it, provided the death we impose is less dreadful than the death nature will impose later. For all sorts of reasons, we feel differently about employing the same sort of calculus to people, and one of the most important of these is the fact that the well-being of people is in large measure dependent on their expectation of having a death whose timing is determined by the whim of nature rather than by the whim of their fellows. No such considerations apply to animals, and that makes a difference.
Besides, we are not behaving like moral philosophers when we hunt. We are engaging in an atavistic, primitive, natural activity which can be justified rationally and can be defended morally, but which is not in itself a rational or moral activity.
Roger Scruton7 has, as one might expect, expressed the huntsman's view the best: in remarkable passages which begin with a description of animal feeling, he then moves on to the human feeling:

No equine joy matches that of running side by side with other horses, immersed in the great tide of species-life and excited by the baying of hounds - a sound which stirs a collective memory of primeval terror, but which echoes back from those unconscious reaches not as terror but as joy. The horses became the remarkable thing that he is by fleeing that sound. He finds his fulfilment in pursuing it.
Something similar is true of us. We began as prey, saved ourselves by preying and acquiring meanwhile a blood-filling joy in the chase... Like the horse, man is a social animal, who survives as a group or not at all. Like the horse, he faces danger and hardship collectively. And like the horse he saves himself by a common feat of exertion. All these ancient and once much visited truths are stirred in the moment of hunting, and come vividly alive in us as we return, together with our two most trusted friends among the animals, to the primordial thrill of contest.

Scruton believes that there is a kind of sin at the heart of civilisation because it has lifted itself above the animal. In hunting, some of this separation from the animals and the rest of nature is restored.
This is moving and useful stuff, and it goes a long way toward seeing hunting as something quite noble and grand. It is a way of thinking which elevates the blood-lust to something useful and also above mere utility.
It will not do for many people, and it might not make much sense to many of those who hunt, either. I can frankly say that I love this sort of thinking and at the same time accept that it is a minority line of argument.
And this is the crunch. Hunting, like all contentious activities in society needs a sort of "licence to operate". This is language, by the way, developed most clearly by firms such as oil and mining companies who recognise that their activities must necessarily be controversial, and that only a democratic ordained endorsement can allow their continuance.
I think we would lose an enormous amount if this country were too lose hunting. One of these things is that old English sense that we should leave old habits in place if we possibly can and only abolish them if they can neither be reformed nor justified. I think hunting can in part be justified by its being part of an unsentimental but deeply felt way of living alongside nature. And so these two themes combine: It is not so much that this society might turn against hunting which I worry about, it is the ease, the laziness, the casual indifference, the sloppy acceptance of a sentimental view of humanity and naturalness, with which modern Britons appear willing to junk tradition and destroy the pleasure of men and women who are at least as moral and virtuous as those who despise them.
Many people believe that deer management on Exmoor and the Quantocks could indeed be so conducted as to produce an almost uniquely "good" death, a death by shooting, for almost all the animals involved. And that is the peculiar rub. Deer are at the moment hunted in a way which is arguably but not certainly the most cruel hunting we know. And yet they are animals we could manage nearly painlessly. Or can we?

Chapter Four: Conservation, with or without the hounds?
It is commonly assumed that the abolition of hunting would bring about a catastrophic decline in deer numbers on places like Exmoor. One of the most respected enthusiasts of the species is G C Floyd, whose booklet "All His Rights" is in a long tradition of amateur naturalism. It is, by the way, adamantly opposed to hunting: Floyd describes the practice as cruel and unnecessary. And yet, he insists, "Hunting has preserved Red deer for centuries in the West Country and as its hold over the deer is gradually eroded, so the deer pay the price. With the ever increasing likelihood of the abolition of blood sports without protective legislation for the deer of Exmoor, then they are sure to suffer their most significant decline this century". Floyd paints a picture of a world without hunting, and the deer hounded by legal and illegal shooting into a few isolated wild pockets of mostly coastal woodland.
It is as commonly supposed that hunting has kept the herd in good condition. This is not entirely uncontroversial. Almost any account of Exmoor's Red deer, from almost any period, bemoans a recent decline in the quality of the herd. Archibald Hamilton8 talks of the vast size of ancient antlers discovered in peat bogs, and says records of a century before his time talk of bigger antlers in the "modern" herd. Marc Thole bemoaned to me the absence of mature males, as does G C Floyd, when he discusses both the scarcity of really big males and the preponderance of hinds to stags in the current herd.
Yet the herd does seem to have been preserved in good condition, and - almost as important - in something like balance with the world around them. Local farmers own something like three-quarters of the deer's range, and their fields supply a substantial proportion of the deer's food. The most widely-respected professional researcher on the red deer of Exmoor is Dr Jochen Langbein.9 He remarks

Deer numbers within Exmoor and the Quantock Hills have increased substantially over the last three decades; combined estimates for the two areas currently exceed at minimum of 3000 red deer, over 500 fallow, and at least several hundred roe. The herds remain in very good condition, but in some, though by no means in all parts of the region, grazing by deer is significantly suppressing natural tree regeneration in ancient semi-natural woodlands, and causes substantial losses to commercial forestry and farm crops.

Langbein suggests that provided the numbers of deer did not go below perhaps half their present numbers, the herd would be viable whilst their impact would be lowered. This would also be something like the numbers of deer half way through this century.

Although deer numbers over the last decade have been at a historical high, no signs of declining condition or performance are apparent within the herds.

This is not a situation we can take for granted. Local farmers mostly have leases which would not allow them to forbid the hunt access to their land. But in the absence of hunting, they would also have the right to kill deer they thought were damaging their livelihood.
After all, as Langbein writes,

The primary responsibility for the stewardship of deer in this country ..... lies with individual landowners and managers. It is their livelihood or land use objectives that are most directly affected by impact from deer, and indeed they, subject to restrictions regarding close seasons and permitted methods of taking deer laid down in the Deer Act (1991), who have the legal right to decide how many deer to tolerate or cull on their land. In any voluntary but sustainable system of deer management, the role of owners and managers must therefore be central, and the risk that landholders suffer significant net losses through their tolerance of deer should be minimised. Preferably, there should be clear and demonstrable benefits to be gained through sustaining a healthy deer population, but one that remains at a level where it does not cause significant losses in biodiversity in semi-natural habitats.

On the other hand, a significant proportion of local landholders have stated that a change in their ability to hunt deer, will lead them to tolerate significantly fewer deer on their land than previously. A planned reduction of deer numbers in some areas need not in itself be detrimental to conservation of the herds, and may in the event be balanced by increases in areas where their impact is more readily sustained. However, in the absence of a coherent overall policy for deer conservation and co-ordination of deer management within the National Park or Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, or plans on how these recent changes will be managed, a great deal of uncertainty exists; especially among the many landholders from both sides and other interested parties, who are keen to continue to conserve and manage deer in a positive manner irrespective of the hunting issue.

They might have to be very keen indeed. A ban on hunting with hounds would put at threat an apparatus which will take a good deal of replacing. Hunting farmers tolerate high deer numbers. They are an anti-poaching police-force. The hunt, which they help fund and support, maintains a pack of hounds which is uniquely good at tracking the few deer which the hunt's stalkers damage without killing when they cull deer. The hunt is available and willing to undertake expensive searches for road-damaged deer, or any other casualties.
It is interesting to note here that the hunt's most humane role - the tracking with hounds and quick dispatch of wounded deer - is a useful corollary to their role as cullers of excess deer by shooting. Any solution to the hunting issue which reads wrongly the welfare of hound-hunted deer risks causing far more pain to deer if it cannot invent and fund a good alternative to the present system. Such an alternative is not impossible to imagine, but it is interesting how few anti-hunt people seem to bother with rounded thinking.
The Wildlife Network and the anti-hunt people mentioned here are not shallow in that way. Mr Batchelor of the League says,

The hunt's being a fallen stock service is a real issue. In the case of casualty deer, the vast majority of that is to deal with animals which are injured or dead so they're not running away. So hounds aren't really needed for that. I see the value in the safe and secure disposal of fallen stock [and despatching] casualty deer but I don't see that as an argument for continuing hunting at all. There is a value in that service but it doesn't justify hunting.

For him, if this a problem which must be solved, then let it be without incurring the moral cost of the present hunt.
WN has come to the conclusion that no welfare case against hunting will make good sense unless it can also address the conservation case for something at least as good or better to replace it in deer management terms.
WN is broadly supportive of Langbein's own idea that:

In light of the very uneven distribution of deer and localised nature of their impact on habitats within Exmoor and the Quantock Hills highlighted by results of my recent research (Langbein, 1997), I recommended the creation of a network of relatively small local Deer Management Groups ; and that a widely supported regional deer management policy document should be developed, in order to strengthen co-operation between landholders, voluntary and statutory organisations, and guide and encourage the formation of further local DMGs in addition to those already in existence. The recent changes outlined above make it all the more important to ensure good levels of co-operation among neighbouring landholders in managing deer, even where they hold opposing views on acceptable methods of deer control.

This sort of view tallies well with the thinking of people such as Doreen Cronin, amongst the most diligent of anti-hunt activists, who suggests that:

We wish to see a management scheme devised for the deer of Exmoor and the Quantock Hills which would rely on competent marksmen, using the right weapons, making an annual cull based an assessment of numbers, by sex, age, etc. We believe that unlike hunting the weakest specimens should be culled. We believe too, as experience stalkers have maintained, one must be meticulous in shooting the calf of a hind to be culled. If this is not done, the calf will be condemned to fall to the bottom of the pecking order and come under tremendous social pressure. It cannot cope with this and has a miserable existence as a poor "doer". Unfortunately when hinds are chased with hounds in November their calves, born in July or July, will only be three or four months old and they are frequently split up during the chase. At that age it is not always evident once a herd is disturbed which calf and hind belong together, so there is no attempt to ensure that both are taken. Even if the hind escapes she and her calf will probably end up in different territories and are unlikely to renew contact.10 Additionally, towards the end of the hind-hunting season, in February, the hind will probably be pregnant with her next calf.

WN believes that there are many people in the West Country, including people who at present hunt, who would fall in with such plans, partly because of their own love of deer, and perhaps because of the possible right to sell stalking holidays. Most people will probably believe that hunting with hounds should be stopped. Their kind-heartedness may produce a welfare benefit for deer, but not if they allow their dislike of hunting with hounds to rush them to ban it before they have worked out how to put large resources into culling deer in what they believe to be a more gentle way.
WN's pressure towards some constructive thinking on these lines is very important since a ban on deer-hunting will, whether one likes it or not, almost certainly happen.

Appendix 1
Comments by Patrick Bateson

Richard North honestly sets out his own position on stag-hunting. The bias is fine when it is up-front, but disappointing when it leads to unbalanced reporting. I shall give some examples of where his own views and his exposure to pro-hunting groups have discoloured his writing too much.

Richard North misstates the argument about the physiological measurement of stress. He never discusses the blood damage issue, he doesn't consider the behavioural evidence and he doesn't understand the significance of one of the passages from John Webster about repeated stress. I'll return to most of these points later on.

Richard North states that: "Having established in his own mind that there is deer suffering, Professor Bateson then goes on to declare - as scientist - that the suffering is unacceptable". The clear implication of this passage is that I misused my scientific authority to sway the opinions of the National Trust Council members. I think this is unfair. The terms of reference of my report were:

"To study suffering as a welfare factor in the management of red deer on National Trust properties on Exmoor and the Quantock Hills having regard, inter alia, to the scientific evidence on stress induced in deer by hunting with hounds and by other culling methods, animal welfare legislation, and the likely effects, in so far as they can be estimated, of a hunting ban on suffering among deer."

I had to make a judgement on the welfare of hunted deer and set that in the context of current legislation on animal welfare. As a scientist, I have often had to make a decision about whether the treatment of animals is acceptable within the legal and ethical framework that exists in this country. The bottom line is: "Give the animal the benefit of the doubt".

I do not think that Richard North is right to make an issue out of the different level of judgements here and claiming that my approach is at best flawed and at worst dishonest.

Richard North states that the emphasis which I placed on cortisol as a physiological measure of stress was "old fashioned" and that I should have discussed more than I did the role of beta-endorphin. On this he is wrong - as was I initially. I too thought that beta-endorphin, as an opioid, played some kind of analgesic role and that blood plasma levels are an indicator of what happens centrally in the brain. However, Elizabeth Bradshaw and I stated in our 1997 paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society the view that more accurately represents modern opinion:

"In humans, at least, what is assayed as ß-endorphin, which has opioid activity in the brain, may be ß-lipotrophin (Gibson et al. 1993), which does not have opioid activity; ß-lipotrophin has the same precursor as ß-endorphin and ACTH, which stimulates synthesis of cortisol, but release in hunted deer of what was assayed as ß-endorphin was not strongly associated with cortisol. Although high concentrations in the plasma of 'ß-endorphin' are often associated with physiological and psychological stress in other species (Broom & Johnson 1993), the functional significance
outside the brain is poorly understood. It is of considerable interest,
therefore, that in the hunted deer "ß-endorphin" was strongly correlated with CK concentration."

On cortisol too we deal with the issues which Richard North states have not been discussed by me:

"The cortisol concentrations were much higher in hunted animals than in non-hunted animals; the concentrations in non-hunted deer were low, but not significantly different from undisturbed deer studied by others (e.g. Smith & Dobson 1990; Carragher et al 1997; Ingram et al 1997). Hunting produced bigger effects than most other stressors applied to red deer (e.g. Smith & Dobson 1990; Carragher et al 1997; Diverio et al 1996; Jago et al 1997). Indeed, the concentrations were as high as have ever been observed in red
deer, even when challenged with adrenocorticotrophic hormone (ACTH), which triggers a maximal release of cortisol (Bubenik & Bartos 1993; Goddard et al 1994; Ingram et al 1997) . The patterns of the hunts in which deer repeatedly dashed away from hounds, only to be found again, meant that these deer were successively triggered into flight. This may explain why cortisol concentrations were so high in hunted deer. Cortisol is commonly referred to as a 'stress hormone' because its secretion is associated with many types of physical and emotional challenge, such as exercise, social isolation, loss of social status and hypoglycaemia (Broom & Johnson 1993); exercise alone typically does not lead to maximal response unless accompanied by other challenges (Mason 1971). Cortisol concentrations elevated to the extremes observed in the hunted deer provide a strong indicator of great physiological and psychological stress."

While I freely admit that I am not a physiologist, the attempt to
characterise me as a total amateur who has made a mess of the physiological side was over-played by my critics - and more lightly by Richard North.

Our measurements, which were so attacked in the months following the publication of the report, were almost exactly replicated by the scientists funded by the Countryside Alliance. Where I can claim greater expertise than my critics is in assessments of whole animal biology. We did collect quantitative evidence of the behaviour during hunts. We also measured what
happens to deer when they are near hunts and how far they move when they are not disturbed. We assessed how far deer are adapted to long chases.

We concluded that with inefficient cooling mechanisms (they do not sweat), they would be more subject to heat stress and in the early stage of a hunt would be particularly like to overheat. The Joint Universities (JU) study found high temperatures in deer that were killed at an early stage in the hunt and, therefore, not forced to travel slowly because they had exhausted their carbohydrate energy resources.

My critics neither use nor understand the behavioural arguments. This doesn't prevent them from making some astonishing assertions in deep ignorance of measurement techniques used in behavioural biology. How is it possible, they ask, for deer to spend significantly more time lying down at the end of the hunt while, at the same, cantering? The answer is quite simply that performance of behavioural category within a given category is recorded as 1 and non-occurrence as 0. Subsequently the incidence of ones and zeros in the given time period is examined across the population of animals. The implication of this for a welfare argument is that even at a stage when the animals are showing visible signs of tiring (corroborated by low glycogen and lactate and glucose), deer will make supreme efforts to get away.

The intense activity and over-heating at the beginning of a hunt probably explains the evidence for early onset of blood damage in hunted deer. The blood damage is embarrassing to my critics for reasons which I shall explain and they attempt to belittle it by arguing correctly that haemolysis (the break up of red blood cells releasing haemoglobin into the plasma) could occur for many reasons both before and after death. The difficulty for such a facile dismissal of inconvenient evidence is that in the living animal haemoglobin breaks down into bilirubin. The conversion of haemoglobin into bilirubin is a rate-limited process and the longer the hunt the greater the amount of haemoglobin. That evidence is highly consistent with the view that haemolysis occurs in the early stage of all hunts. In our study haemoglobin at the end of the hunt was strongly correlated with bilirubin. In the JU study it wasn't. The JU scientists attempt to make capital out of this without explaining our finding. There is no particular reason why haemoglobin should be correlated with bilirubin at the end of a hunt, particularly if intense activity late in the hunt causes fresh haemolysis. One difference between the two studies was that
their hunts were significantly shorter than ours and lactate was depleted significantly more quickly. This suggests that, for whatever reason , the JU deer suffered more bouts of intense activity than the Bateson & Bradshaw deer. Whether or not I am right in this speculation, both data sets show very clearly that the longer the time elapsing between the beginning of a hunt and the end, the higher the level of bilirubin. This suggests that physiological abnormalities occurred early in the hunts. It might not necessarily indicate a welfare problem, but on the assumption that animals should be given the benefit of the doubt, it is not evidence that should be lightly dismissed.

On myopathy, Richard North uncritically accepts reports that deer are seen back where they had originally been found after a hunt. He repeats the argument of the local people on Exmoor that, if myopathy occurred and led to death on certain occasions, the dead deer would have been found. At the same time he accepts the figure that per cent of the deer culled with rifles escape wounded. This suits the pro-hunt case because it suggests that the alternative to hunting with hounds itself causes a great deal of suffering with many deer condemned to a lingering death. However, they can't have it both ways.

A simple calculation suggests that the locals would be missing at least seven deer wounded by stalkers per year. Annual counts of the deer population on Exmoor and the Quantocks are made regularly. These are thought to be underestimates since many deer cannot be seen during the counts. But the figure provides a starting point. The highly conservative figure for the population of red deer on Exmoor and the Quantocks in the mid-1990s was about 2500 and the visual counts were giving roughly similar numbers each year. To maintain a stable population would require 20 per cent of the total number to die every year as a result of culling and other causes. This gives a figure of 500 red deer dying each year on Exmoor and the Quantocks. Of these 88 are killed on average by the stag-hunts on Exmoor and the Quantocks and an unknown number die from road-traffic accidents, disease and other miscellaneous causes. An estimate of the number that escape after being wounded by stalkers may be obtained from the proportion of disabled deer that were victims of poor shooting. The lowest estimate for deer escaping after being wounded by stalkers is 16 per year. We examined the records made by the officials of the Devon and Somerset Staghounds when they killed injured or diseased red deer and when they found dead deer. In the 1994-1995 season the total number was 32 and in 1995-1996 it was 56, excluding the remains of animals killed by poachers. Of these, nine, and up to nine deer, respectively, appeared to be the victims of poor shooting. If the population of the red deer on Exmoor and the Quantocks is higher than 2500, as many experts believe, then the number escaping wounded and remaining undetected will be a lot higher than seven deer per year.

Richard North is perfectly entitled to describe me as having "the
self-confidence necessary to be an academic high flyer". The impression he seeks to leave, however, is of somebody who has ignored his critics and over-stepped what is reasonable in scientific discourse. It is indeed correct that I didn't discuss the conclusions of my report with academic colleagues (apart from Elizabeth Bradshaw, of course). But his account misrepresents what happened afterwards.

After the report came out, I did not shut myself away from further
discussion. I voluntarily participated in a seminar organised by the BFSS to discuss our work in July 1997. On the advice of a judge in an interlocutory court, the National Trust invited the BFSS and the stag-hunts to present their case against my report. They did so at great length. The matter was discussed at the NT Council meeting on October 1997. The Council contained several scientists who were competent to judge the arguments. They were unimpressed by the counter-blast and the Council reaffirmed its decision to ban stag-hunting. For the next year I continued to have discussions with Dr Wise, publishing with him a letter in the Veterinary Record on the empirical matters that might help to clarify the different interpretations that had been placed on the data we collected. I helped Dr Harris and his group design their study and, when their data were in, I helped in the statistical analysis of the data. In September 1998 I hosted a seminar on the interpretation of the data. I don't think that any of this can be characterised as the actions of a man who was unprepared to reopen the matter.

Dr Wise had said cheerfully throughout our reasonably friendly discussions that he would go to war with me if I didn't make concessions. He clearly was not interested in the science at all. I fell out with him after the meeting in September 1998 because I strongly objected to the way my openness to argument was misrepresented as "Bateson has changed his mind."

I had to reaffirm publicly that I stood by the conclusions of my report. Wise believed that I had behaved dishonourably but disinterested people ascribed the gulf between myself and Wise as due to a difference of interpretation.

Any scientific matter that impinges on an intense and highly polarised public debate will be interpreted in different ways. This is partly because science is an uncertain business and individuals will differ in their judgements about how well the evidence supports a particular conclusion. Some scientists hold strong views and have particularly well-developed evidence filters, and occasionally, as in the smoking and lung cancer battle, some scientists support the interests of the organisations which pay their salaries.

Professor Patrick Bateson
The Provost's Lodge
King's College
Cambridge

Appendix 2

7.4.1 The hunting of deer using dogs should be made illegal, either by an amendment to the current 1991 Deer Act or by a separate Act of Parliament.

7.4.2 The Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and the Secretary of State for Wales should, as permitted under Section 7 sub-section 5, repeal sub-section 2 of the same section, by deleting a legal use of a smoothbore gun, as permitted by the Act for damage limitation purposes. This would not affect the use of such a weapon in order to prevent the suffering of an injured or diseased deer.

7.4.3 Consideration should be given to the prohibition of the use of any firearm (other than for the purpose of preventing the suffering of an injured or diseased deer) within the prescribed close season.

7.4.4 Consideration should be given to the formation of a Deer Commission for England and Wales (similar to the Deer Commission for Scotland).

7.4.5 Consideration should also be given to legally recognising deer management groups which would take over the role of controlling deer in relevant areas.

7-4.6 Consideration should be given to a compensation scheme enabling payments to be made to landowners who can prove their interests have been harmed by the presence of deer on their land or for the perceived enhancement of the area or for the preservation of the local deer population.

7.4.7 Consideration should be given to the enhancing of certain parts of Exmoor and other appropriate areas to attract red deer. Moor land, for example, can sustain larger numbers of deer, provided ideal cover is close at hand. This would ensure larger numbers in areas which can sustain them.

7.4.8 Carcass tagging: all deer shot must be tagged.

ends
1 The behavioural and physiological effects of culling red deer: Report to the Council of the National Trust, by Professor Patrick Bateson, FRS
2 The WN position on deer appears as Appendix 2
3 Animal Welfare: A cool eye towards Eden, John Webster, Blackwell Science, 1994
4 The Bateson Report: Use or abuse of science?, Douglas Wise, forthcoming from the Countryside Alliance.
5 Animal Welfare, see above
6 The physiological response of red deer (Cervus elaphus) to prolonged escape exercise undertaken during hunting, Harris, R C, et al, forthcoming from the Countryside Alliance. This is also known as the Joint Universities Study on Deer Hunting, or the JU Study.
7 On Hunting, Roger Scruton, Yellow Jersey Press, London, 1998
8 The Red Deer of Exmoor, 1907
9 The ranging behaviour, habitat-use and impact of deer in oak woods and heather moors Exmoor and the Quantock Hills, Dr Jochen Langbein, University of Southampton, Biodiversity and Ecology Department, published by The British Deer Society, Fordingbridge, Hampshire, UK, 1997
10 Tom Yandle says he simply does not recognise this picture, and believes that by the time the hinds are hunted in November, their calves are fully grown. The picture of disorientated young might once have applied in Scotland's very dfferent circumstances and before reforms in practice.