Eat A Deer - Save A Tree

Deer populations are booming — but our landscapes are paying the price.

In this episode, David Hooton from the Forestry Commission breaks down why managing deer isn’t just a conservation issue, it’s a food one. We explore the real impact of overpopulation on UK woodlands, and why eating venison is a practical, sustainable solution hiding in plain sight.

If we want healthier ecosystems, it might start with what’s on our plate.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Hello and welcome to the Venison Podcast. You're joined by me, Louisa, and today my guest is David Hooten. Hi David.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Hello, hello. Nice to see you again. Oh very well, thanks. Yep, all very good. Very keen to start. So, yes, I'm David Hooten. I work for the Forestry Commission as an area deer officer. I'm based in the east of England, the East Midlands. So I've got sort of an area of ground that covers pretty much from the Humber down to the Thames estuary and across inland to the far end of Bedfordshire and up to the top end of the Peak District. I'm based in Berry Sedmonds in Suffolk and I've been involved in deer management now for the best part of 30 plus years. So all things deer.

SPEAKER_00 0:53

Yeah, it's understanding. So what exactly does your role involve?

SPEAKER_01 0:58

So currently we're working with lots of different landowners and landowning organisations, looking at wild deer populations, looking at the extent at which they range, population numbers, and the impact that they cause to a variety of land uses from sort of the existing landscapes, so the arable landscape that's currently in place and the existing woodlands and the associated biodiversity that lives within those areas, but also looking at the new woodland creation sites and working with some really exciting projects that are looking at landscape enhancements from a biodiversity environmental point of view, called landscape recovery, protected site strategies, looking at the triple SI networks, looking at ancient semi natural woodlands, and looking at how we can enhance those in relation to the sort of land use that landowners want to do as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:48

So, this sort of episode we're kind of going to focus on deer because some of our listeners might want to eat venison but they don't know anything about deer. So, Firstie, could you tell us how many species of deer there are in the UK?

SPEAKER_01 2:03

There are six wild deer species. So we've got the native deer species, so only two of those six are native, so they've been here sort of for a long, long, long, long time, forever. They are the red deer, the big iconic red, and then the roe deer. You find them pretty much all over east of England, and a lot of the country have a lot of roe deer. Red deer sort of tend to be populations in East Anglia, parts of the southwest of England, and Lake District, Scotland, Yorkshire. You don't always find them everywhere, Staffordshire. So they're still fairly widespread, but not everywhere. Roe deer, if you look at the distribution maps of roe deer now, they are pretty much everywhere. Then we've got the introduced species, uh, fallow deer in the traditional Parkland deer. Uh they were introduced by both the Romans and the Normans. Uh, a lot of remnant populations stem now from the old Parklands, and they are spread right across the country with increasing populations. Muntjack and Chinese water deer introduced by the Duke of Bedfordshire and one or two others in the late 1800s, and their populations are now expanding rapidly. Muntjack across all of pretty much a line from the Humber to the top end of Wales and south, with odd populations north of those now, and Chinese water deer very much east of England based.

SPEAKER_00 3:24

Yeah, I'm obviously based in Herefordshire and we have a huge problem with muntjack. Um, but they also taste wonderful, so they are my favourite meat to eat.

SPEAKER_01 3:33

Um interestingly, you wouldn't have had muntjack in any number five years ago.

SPEAKER_00 3:38

No, they've definitely really expanded. I've really noticed, and they're also starting to hurt because there's just so many of them. Which um so for those listening, of I Munjacks are quite solitary, really, aren't they?

SPEAKER_01 3:53

They are, yes. A solitary, a female, uh, when she's in season, she'll have a little male running around after her. Uh, she might have a dependent young, but generally they are sort of smallish territory areas, always in an area of woodland or scrub. Uh, we find a lot of them around the town's edges now, into the allotments, uh cemeteries, any area of scrub you'll find Munjack in now in southern England. But their ranges are expanding, you know. Ranges of all deer have expanded a lot since I started working in the early 1990s. It it's something that is in some respects a a success story, you know. It's um it's lovely to have these animals roaming wild in our countryside, and deer have a place. I just wish that we had more of our native species and not so many of our non-native species, because these non-natives are causing so much impact and harm to our natural biodiversity that they are conflicting with what we want as a country from carbon sequestration to biodiversity enhancement to landscapes that function well for the landowners involved.

SPEAKER_00 5:00

Yes, in Munjack, do they come from Japan originally?

SPEAKER_01 5:04

Yeah, China Asia.

SPEAKER_00 5:06

Yeah, and that's the same with Sika, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 5:09

Sika deer come from uh more Japan and the Far East, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:13

Yeah. Um so the oh and Chinese water deer, obviously, I guess, is in the name.

SPEAKER_01 5:21

It is a little bit the name, yes it is, yeah. Um very interestingly, we we've got a quite a high percentage of the global population live in England. Um at one point we probably had about 25% of the global population living in sort of three counties, Norfolk, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire. Wow. Um we're not quite sure of the percentages now because uh there's been quite a lot of conservation work in their native home ranges of China and um North Korea, where their populations are expanding and expanding quite rapidly through habitat protection and also less people eating them out there.

SPEAKER_00 5:57

Do you Chinese water don't mate all year-round like muntjack do, do they?

SPEAKER_01 6:02

No, they don't know. So the muntjack, as you say, have what we call a seasonal breeding, so they can breed as soon as it becomes seven months old or seven kilos in weight, the females will become uh fertile and pregnant pretty much, and then they work on a seven or eight month cycle after that. They have something called postpartum estrus, which means that they can actually become pregnant while they're still lactating, but within sort of a week of giving birth, they'll become pregnant again.

SPEAKER_00 6:27

Oh god, poor things. I can't think of anything well.

SPEAKER_01 6:33

Essentially with a toddler running around.

SPEAKER_00 6:37

I guess that shows why their population is increasing so much, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 6:42

It it is, and they've they've become very adept at surviving in in England. If we look at the Forestry Commission research in the mid-1970s, the general thought was that because this country used to have particularly sort of hard winters and long, prolonged spells of cold, that their survival rates would be reduced because of this a-seasonal breeding. As our climates have warmed and our sort of habitats have sort of been able, well, they've been able to sustain themselves in the habitats quite effectively, they they haven't had this winter mortality that we we expected. And very few deer now in lowland England suffer from winter mortality. Scotland's slightly different, we do get harsh winters in Scotland, uh, and some of the red deer do suffer when they're up on the hills in Scotland. But generally in England, we're seeing very good survival rates of all our deer species.

SPEAKER_00 7:34

Um what is the actual um number of deer? I know I've heard um anything, someone one guy said 10 million, which I know is not, you know, that's far too many, but what what it's really interesting, Louise.

SPEAKER_01 7:51

I mean, I've been doing population modelling and counting for a lot of years now, and way back in the 1990s, in the late 1980s, when I was at college, we were talking about vantage point counting. So we'd get 30 or 40 or 50 people out across a landscape and count the deer we saw and map it. Over the years, techniques have changed. So we did something called dung counting for a period of time. So you'd count the amount of dung you found on transects in woodland and then extrapolate up from that with known decay rates and known defecation rates. Decay rates change depending upon the habitat and the time of year and what else they're feeding on. Uh defecation rates are about sort of how many times a deer goes to the toilet each day, and that's been studied from people watching deer behaviour. Uh, and it comes up with another figure. What we're now using is aerial drones with thermal emission cameras on them, and this has just revolutionized the way we can count deer. You know, previously it was based on assumptions and everything else. Now we can actually see these deer dawn, dusk, and through the night, uh, particularly the large deer species. Muntjack are much more hard to see, they hide away a bit more, but certainly with the larger deer species, we can count them quite effectively. Uh, in some areas we're looking at landscape densities now of a hundred deer per square kilometre. Uh, in other areas we're looking at six, seven deer per square kilometre. It all depends upon the habitat types within that landscape. So there's no sort of fixed density across the country. Uh, here in East Anglia, we've got at least four deer species or even five deer species on some of our sites. So multiple species make for increased impact in different ways. Uh, so we don't really know how many deer there are, um, so but we are working on counting them in different habitat types and different areas to work out what there is locally to give us an indication of what those likely impacts are going to be. So, estimates of deer population back in the 1970s was about 450,000 across the country. Um, those figures sort of started to move up to about a million when I started working back in 1994-95. We started talking about two million in 2015, but realistically, we don't know what figures there are. And actually, numbers are important for a couple of reasons. One is it gives you an indication of how many you need to cull as part of that natural recruitment process. So if you're trying to maintain a population at a certain level, you need to be culling at levels of annual recruitment. If you're trying to reduce a population, you need to cull more than your recruitment level each year. So it gives you an idea of where you need to be. But what we're really focused on is what the impact is to those habitats. Because that's what matters, because we want some deer in the environment, but we want them at a level that doesn't conflict with those site management objectives of enhanced biodiversity and uh structure of our woodlands or producing farm crops.

SPEAKER_00 10:57

Well, that actually leads on to my next question, but I was just going to add it's something for Lean and Wilde, you know, as a venison meat supplier, we want to be ensuring that we're not reducing, you know, too many, you know, taking too many roe out of the ecosystem and things like that. So we are trying to work very closely with people like the British Deer Society to ensure that um all we're sustainably harvesting um the meat, I guess, um, or culling, you know, so we're not removing too many, etc. But it's interesting. So, yeah, what my next question was going to be um, why do we need to control the numbers? And I I I guess a lot of people don't know the reasons for for having to remove deer.

SPEAKER_01 11:40

It's all about managing habitats. So if we're trying to create a new woodland, the deer will come along and they'll nibble the trees. If you're trying to manage existing woodlands and try and have a structural biodiversity with diversity within, so you want a scrub layer, you want natural regeneration of the current tree species, you might be supplementary planting. And these habitats are really important for other things to live in. So you create a habitat, and then migratory birds like the nightingale can come in and find somewhere to nest. If you haven't got the structure available for the nightingale to nest in, it will then move into suboptimal habitats and then won't be able to breed as effectively, in very simple terms.

SPEAKER_00 12:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:24

So we need to ensure that when we're managing habitats, we manage them in a way that is optimal for the species of bird or the species of butterfly or moth or small mammal that wants to live there or we want to live there. So there's a number of introduction projects of a doormouse, and if you haven't got the structure the doormouse wants and the honeysuckle for them to feed on, they're not going to survive. So you need to create the habitat for them, and that means managing the woodland in terms of civicultural cutting, rotational coppicing, production of food sources, nectar sources for different species, and the deer will impact on that. And we accept some impact, we accept some trampling, we accept some trackways, but the habitat needs to be impacted in a low way. And when I talk about impact, it's about the deer eating predominantly the things that we want to grow.

SPEAKER_00 13:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:17

And each deer species tends to feed in a different way. So muntjack are selective browsers. We've already said that they live sort of in either very small family groups or solitary, but they spend a lot of time just in the woodland. And I would sort of call it almost hoovering up the understory, they'll feed on all the plants. So there's a little plant called the ox slip, it looks a bit like a cow slip. It's only found within 20 miles of Cambridge. So globally, it's quite an endangered plant. But the munjacks selectively feed on that flowering head.

SPEAKER_00 13:52

Oh, it must taste amazing.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

I I haven't tried one, so I don't know. It smells lovely and it looks beautiful, but the deer are impacting on that. So munjack will selectively browse the flowering heads, which stops plants seeding. And these ancient woodland plants are really susceptible to high levels of browsing or even moderate levels of browsing. What does that mean in terms of moderate or high or low? It means the number of plants in an area that are not able to seed. And I would say, sort of, if they've got more than 20% browsing, that's sort of coming into a moderate level because we want all these plants to thrive in our landscape. I was actually walking the woodland that I was monitoring yesterday, and I found two oxide plants on the main ride, and I don't remember seeing them there before.

SPEAKER_00 14:40

I agree.

SPEAKER_01 14:40

So the deer density there has been reduced. We still see Munjack, we still see roe and red deer, but we're seeing them on a less frequent basis, and their activity within those areas is much lower. So they're not always visible, they're not always browsing these areas, so leaving the plants alone for longer periods of time, which means they can seed and flourish, providing seed obviously for the next generation of plants, but also nectar sources for the butterflies that live in the woodland. You know, as we walk around the woodlands, we see the brimstones, the tortoise shells, the little browns on the meadows. You know, there's a whole suite of insects and birds and butterflies that want to thrive in our woodlands, and they can't because the structure's not there.

SPEAKER_00 15:21

And also another reason I think for reducing the numbers is because if there's not enough food, then the welfare of the deer is actually impacted, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 15:33

It can be in localized areas when densities reach very high levels. Our landscapes do provide a lot of food. If you include the farm crops.

SPEAKER_00 15:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:45

We've got winter cereal crops being planted now, so there's a food available throughout the year. If we go to the 1960s, 1970s, there weren't so many cereal crops being planted as as winter winter crops. So the amount of vegetation wasn't necessarily as available. Although, if you look at an overwinter stubble, there's lots of little plants on it that thrive in an overwinter stubble that then provides little nectar sources or plants and seed for other things to live on. So the habitats actually provide a lot of food. If we're not worried about the habitat, uh, there was a very high deer density in the south of England for a period of time, somewhere called Ashdown Forest. And the body weights of the fallow deer there, normally an average fallow doe will weigh about 30 kilos, a larder weight. If they're not eating enough food, their body weights reduce, but it doesn't seem to affect them, they just get smaller.

SPEAKER_00 16:40

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 16:41

Because they're still able to go elsewhere and get enough food to survive. Now, at what point do they become malnourished and then you have a high instance of potential disease risk?

SPEAKER_00 16:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:56

And it seems to be a very high deer density, way and above what we've got in any areas at the moment, generally.

SPEAKER_00 17:02

Okay, well that's good to hear that we've managed it enough, so that's not not a problem. Um and arema uh either, I don't know if this is true or false, you might be able to shed some light on it. I heard that deer will avoid um crops that have been sprayed with pesticides.

SPEAKER_01 17:21

Yes, they will. Generally they will, yeah. So where farmers are are sort of obviously managing their crops, they do put on insecticides and herbicides or whatever else they're spraying. And the deer do avoid those while those active ingredients are active. So I'm not quite sure what the scientific sort of things are around it, but they do seem to avoid it when it's been directly applied.

SPEAKER_00 17:49

Yeah, I um they're they're they're organic eaters, aren't they? They like yeah, the nothing that's been sprayed, I I like that. Means the meat, you know, it it hasn't really got any chemicals in it.

SPEAKER_01 18:04

Yeah, and there have been tests of deer carcasses to ensure that there aren't any background levels of contaminants within them. Um where we get deer feeding in areas of uh uh industrial, I'll call it industrial wastelands, is sort of where the old industrial sites were, they may well hold higher levels of contaminants, but but those animals don't go in the food chain.

SPEAKER_00 18:29

No, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:30

They're managing in a very different way.

SPEAKER_00 18:33

Very nicely um to the um, I guess explaining the process of how a deer ends up at um sort of butchery stage. Would you mind giving a little overview of that?

SPEAKER_01 18:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:51

You you do deer management and obviously go out storming. Um so it obviously not it can be hit and miss, you might not see any deer. Um just for the listeners who might not you know know anything about the process, um then we can obviously talk about the British British quality wild venison scheme as part of that standard scheme. Sorry.

SPEAKER_01 19:14

So the the whole stalking deer management process is around the selective management of our deer populations. We've talked about the impacts they cause, and we talk about the recruitment rates of some of the species. So when we're looking at uh an area of ground, we look at what we think it can sustain in terms of sort of like low, high, moderate activity levels and the impacts. So we we look at the species we've got, we tend to go out dawn and dusk. That seems to be the sort of best time because deer are crepuscular feeders, they feed in that dawn and dusk period. And we store ground or we sit waiting and we just assess the groups of deer we see and say, well, which ones do we want to selectively cull? And that's based on the what they which species of deer we want to be managing in those particular areas. We're assessing them for their physical health, and then when we decide which one we're going to manage, we do the process, and then we're always assessing these animals on an ongoing basis from that point of shot to ensure that it is a healthy animal to go into the food chain. But we don't have animals generally that have any ill ill ill health, and it's about ensuring that the product we're providing and producing for the food sector is a product that's fit for use. So we're assessing it, we check its glands, we do the process, it goes into chillers, and then when it goes to a game processing plant, it's checked by a vet. And it's stamped to ensure that not only have we been a trained hunter and we're assessing its glands and making sure it's fit for purpose at our end, as soon as it goes into a game handling establishment, it's also checked by a vet. And it's stamped like every other bit of wild meat, uh any other bit of meat would be.

SPEAKER_00 21:13

I think there's a bit of misconception that people think you can just go out with a gun and shoot deer, and that's not at all the case. And there's a lot of training that has to be done to use.

SPEAKER_01 21:23

There is a there's there's recognised qualifications for deer management, so we've got deer stalking stuff at level one and two, and then we've got a whole suite of best practice guides that people work to to ensure that the management work that's going on is at an industry recognised standard, and that standard is monitored and assessed on an ongoing basis by quite a few people within not just the deer management sector but also the welfare sector. You mentioned British Deer Society Insuring the Welfare of Wild Deer, but our RSPCA sit on something called the Deer Initiative Partnership, and that partnership is made up from 20 plus organisations. With an interest in land and wildlife management to ensure that the sector works at a standard that is acceptable. So that when we are managing, we do it humanely, we do it with animal welfare in mind, we do it with food safety in mind, we do it with habitat protection in mind, so that what's going on out there is part of landscape management and it can be thought of as a process that needs to be undertaken to protect all our interests.

SPEAKER_00 22:29

And something that you've been integral to is the British Quality Wild Venison Standard. Um I don't know if you could just Lean and Wilde are planning to only source uh BQWV um carcasses eventually. That's what we're working towards. Uh and you know, we're setting up our own unit and things. Um, but it'd be great if you could just tell um our listeners a little bit more about this the standard and what it involves.

SPEAKER_01 22:57

Yeah, so the the standard's been developed by a number of organisations and people over the last four and a half, five years to try and provide a recognized independent audit system for the processes we undertake in production of food. A lot of other food sectors have audits, so you've got British Red Tractor, you've got RSPCA Insured, that check the processes involved in the farmed livestock production. And although we've worked to high standards throughout the last 30 or 40 years of wild deer management, these checks have been undertaken by local authorities and the Food Standards Agency, and there's been no independent checks of part of that supply chain. So we've seen fluctuations in venison prices and demand over the last 40 years, some highs and some lows, and we get that with any sort of production of food. People's tastes change, they want different things. So in 2020, we brought together something called the Wild Benson Working Group to look at the Wild Benson supply chain and look at where the current markets were at that point and what the shortfalls were, and how could we get a more sustainable supply chain that was recognised by a greater number of people to make them want to use this marble product called venison and make it wild, not farmed? And I think there's a marketplace for wild, farmed, park, and venison from other parts of the world, but we want to make sure that our wild venison supply chain is a robust supply chain that people can look at and say, yes, we want this product because it's been checked and they work to standards. So we've got the DSC training for all our stalkers, we've got the hunters training to make sure that we know which glands to inspect and how to inspect a carcass, make sure it's fit for the supply chain. Have we got the right infrastructure in place in terms of the extraction equipment, the chillers in the right places, the cold chain security? Because one of the things that's really important is making sure that that product is treated as a food product right way through. And if we can get the audits in place to check that, we can give Lean and Wild and your customers and the customers in the wider field confidence that our product is actually just the same as any other meat, except it's wild, it's been harvested from the natural environment, and it's the management is part of what we need to be doing to protect our landscape. So it's a really good sustainable food source, and having a standard like British quality wild venison is about showing that we want to do the right things and get the right things in place to ensure that we supply food that people want.

SPEAKER_00 25:50

Yeah, I think as a customer who might be a bit nervous about trying a wild meat for the first time, it's really important to know that it's been hand handled at the highest food standard. Um, I also think you just touched on a really key point that you know venison doesn't have to be put into um, you know, it doesn't have the the horrid journey to the abattoir. It doesn't even know that it's about to die, you know, so there's none of that fear hormone or anything like that in it. So I I think you know it's the best meat you can possibly eat, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 26:24

I've been eating venison for 30 years. We eat venison six nights a week. Um because I suppose I can, I'm very lucky that I'm part of this process, and the children have been eating venison since they were able to eat solid food.

SPEAKER_00 26:40

You have a favorite, a favourite species to eat?

SPEAKER_01 26:44

Uh it's probably the water deer, actually. It tends to be sort of a nice sweet flavour. Um bit similar to lamb. Uh I very much enjoy that. I like Munjack, I like roe deer. They're all slightly different, but um my favourite's probably Chinese water deer, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:03

Um I don't know if I've ever eaten Chinese water deer. I've heard it's uh slightly fattier than the other day.

SPEAKER_01 27:09

It is, yes. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 27:11

Um very good for sausages and burgers, I was told.

SPEAKER_01 27:15

It is, um, and I think that's the beauty about this product is you can use it in any way, you use other meats. You know, we do mints, so you make the spaghetti bolognese, you make the cottage pies from it, you can do the vents and burgers, venison sausages, you can do um we're doing a a roast on a barbecue tomorrow, we're taking a haunch and taking the bone out and having it flat on the barbecue tomorrow for some friends coming over. You know, it's such a versatile meat.

SPEAKER_00 27:42

Could you use a question I ask all our guests is um what is your favourite venison dish? Do you have to have just one?

SPEAKER_01 27:49

Just one. Oh, it's got to be the loin steaks done with a sort of garlic and mushroom creamy sauce or or even just flash-fried on a treel. Um you know, it's it's got to be that because it's just such a wonderful piece of meat. But then you put the haunch on the barbecue and you've got that smoky flavour and that the crispy bit on the outside.

SPEAKER_00 28:10

Um I love Muntjack on the barbecue.

unknown 28:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:14

It it it it's just a it's a great, it's a great story, it's a great thing that we we've got, um, and and we need to be managing the populations. So the product we're getting is something that can be utilized right across society from a country food trust doing their work, helping the uh the people in need of food, and right through to some of the nicest restaurants in the country. You know, it's something that is a product that is suitable for any part of society, and it's something that we should be sort of utilising more of.

SPEAKER_00 28:47

Oh David, thank you so much for coming on. It's been so interesting, and hopefully a lot of people have learned a lot about deer listening to this. If anyone had any questions and wanted to get hold of you, uh how is the best way to do that? Should they do that through me or can they contact you directly?

SPEAKER_01 29:03

Uh do it through you. That's probably the easiest way because then they can do it through the website, can't they?

SPEAKER_00 29:07

Yeah. Oh, everyone's got my email, it's Louisa at leanamwild.com. Brilliant. Well, thank you so much, David.

SPEAKER_01 29:13

That's an absolute pleasure, as always, Louisa, and we will see you again soon.

SPEAKER_00 29:17

Bye bye.

SPEAKER_01 29:18

Okay, bye.

SPEAKER_00 29:29

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