Scotland’s deer are proving deeply divisive

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

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

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

What do the locals, whose families may have lived in Scotland for centuries, think of the changes to ‘their’ country?

While deer have done much to create the landscape we see in Scotland today, people now increasingly believe that their ‘habitat shaping’ is regressive rather than an asset. Scotland supports the largest population of red deer in Europe, and this has more than doubled in the past 50 years. Deer eat young trees and the green shoots of vegetation, and overgrazing can damage peat, an important carbon store that needs preserving, not destroying.