I grew up a short walk from Richmond Park in London, which is incredible in many ways but particularly for its wild deer. My father was involved in the public relations of the Park, being the President of the friends association, and that gave me a close interest in the controversy that often came up around culling of the deer twice a year.
In a managed environment like the Park, the deer have no natural predators. If they became too numerous they would eventually die down, but through starvation, and disrupt the environmental balance in the process. Anyone who is involved in managing controlled habitats like this recognises some management of animal numbers is required.
But you’d still get people protesting at the cull. There seemed to be a lack of open, informed discussion around the topic, instead the kind of emotion-driven, knee-jerk reactions a lot of online debate is often plagued by.
What does this have to do with clothing? Well, hunting is an area with a very close connection to menswear – along with things like sport and war it’s one of the big areas it originates from. Hunting is regularly featured in magazines in our area and it supports many great brands.
But I’ve never known what I really thought about it – as a pursuit it was treated as sort of embarrassing, something to be avoided and PRs or managers would brush over.
I like talking about these subjects on Permanent Style. It’s one of the few forums, I think, that can have an informed, balanced discussion about a controversial topic. It has the kind of readership that takes the time to read, and to think, and only make its own considered contribution. So I think it’s an interesting area to discuss – and one I recently had more personal exposure to.
That experience was going stalking in the Scottish Highlands, as a guest of the lovely Campbell’s of Beauly.
Stalking is the traditional way the deer on the Scottish estates are culled. Each estate has a stalker, and they are told by the government how many stags and hinds they have to kill every year. If they don’t kill that number, the government sends in a contractor to do it, sometimes using a helicopter to shoots the animals from the air, and then sends the estate a bill.
The contractors also leave the animal to die, whereas a stalker ensures it’s killed humanely and then takes it home to make use of the meat, the horns and so on. As we discussed with the Icelandic retailer Eggert a few years ago, this always seems more respectful to the animal. It also helps with one of the objections to culling, which is that it’s a waste of animal life.
The thing more people tend to care about though is how the animals are treated when they’re alive – animal cruelty is the first thing that comes up. And as we talked about with a few articles around the subject of fur, I entirely understand the objections of vegetarians in this area – they don’t think any living thing should be used for food.
But if you do eat meat, then the discussion is more about the most responsible and cruelty-free way to source it. And the deer that live in the Highlands must have a better life than almost any animal killed for its meat. They roam over an huge area, in an almost unspoiled environment.
Incidentally, most of the meat from these stags is exported to Scandinavia, because they like the gamey taste more than Brits. The meat from the hinds is more likely to stay here, as is meat from smaller breeds which is farmed.
Animals that are used for high-end purposes – meat, leather or fur – do tend to be treated fairly well. There will always be exceptions, but the bottom line is these animals are just too valuable to be damaged in any way. That particularly goes for high-end leather, where the skin itself is the commodity.
The other emotive subject here, I find, is whether something like culling should be enjoyed and treated as a sport. Is that wrong somehow, if something has to be done but you enjoy doing it?
I’m not sure how I feel about this one. The Highlands is a beautiful place – perhaps the most beautiful I have ever been to. It’s certainly very enjoyable being there and walking the hills, and you appreciate nature and the animals much more in that environment. But I don’t know whether there are people that specifically enjoy the act of killing, because that feels instinctively different.
Perhaps it comes down to how you approach it. Our stalker Hamish (above) for example, says he dislikes people that display the results of their hunt on social media, sort of showing off. Some hunts also involve very little effort from the hunter – eg from a tower – and little involvement with or closeness to the animal.
The keyword might be respect, again. Hunting just for fun implies a kind of lack of respect for the animal, and that’s the opposite of what you see on a stalk like this. These men spend the rest of their year looking after the animals, through the deep winters, and care deeply about their welfare. In fact this closeness often makes other subjects hard.
For example, the bigger debate in Scotland at the moment is apparently about wildlife vs rewilding. The government – and some of the big estates nearby – want the number of deer hugely reduced so small trees are allowed to grow. That’s laudable from an environmental perspective, but means quite a big change to the traditional mix of wildlife.
In Hamish’s words, for most of his life stalkers have been called murderers. Now they’re being told they need to kill more.
All hunting is not culling. Many animals are bred purely to be hunted, and that is categorically different. But even within that type of hunting, there are more and less respectful ways to do it.
What understanding culling does is make you understand that hunting is not black and white. There are significant differences between the types of hunting and the way in which they are pursued. Like most subjects, it gets subtler and more complicated the closer you get. Most people don’t get that close though; they just shout from the sidelines.
But, I hear you cry, enough of the politics – what do people wear? Is it all tweed plus-fours and flat caps, or has that all been replaced with Gore-Tex? Does anyone wear the accessory this sport has given the world – the deerstalker? Pleasingly yes, yes they do. More next week.
