Creating a culture for deer management

摘要

We believe that to achieve a balance between the positive benefits and the negative impacts of wild deer (and feral wild boar) there is a need to manage our wild populations. In the context of this article, management is taken to include all the 'tools' available, including landscape design and fencing, trapping, killing and fertility control.Who owns the deer, who is responsible for it?In the UK, wild deer are considered to be 'ferae naturae' and thus 'res nullius' (don't belong to anyone). Historically, deer management has primarily been motivated by sporting interests and has not been particularly well coordinated. Because deer are in law 'res nullius', but the right to take deer resides with the owner of the land on which they are taken, neither the objectives of management nor the implementation of management are currently under the control of national or regional authorities; theright to manage (or not) rests with the landowneにThus, to achieve management at an appropriate scale we need (voluntary) co-ordination and agreement between landowners. In England, this lack of control in part at least led to the establishment of the Deer Initiative (DI) Partnership.