Oxford Sparks

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Emily Elias: The number of deer in Scotland is creating a bit of an issue because, well, there are a lot of them. On this episode of the Oxford Sparks Big Questions podcast, we’re asking: should we kill animals for conservation?

Emily: Hello, I’m Emily Elias and this is the show where we seek out the brightest minds at the University of Oxford, and we ask them the big questions. And for this one, we found a researcher who wants to have a conversation about conservation.

Jess Frater: I am Jess Frater, and I’m a first-year DPhil student in the Biology Department with the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, looking at the ecology and the social psychology of deer culling in Scotland.

Emily: So today we are talking about, should we kill animals for conservation reasons? And there’s been an interesting sort of case that’s been playing out in Scotland. Can you just kind of, like, walk me through what’s been going on?

Jess: Yeah. There are four species of deer in Scotland: the red and the roe, which are native, and the fallow and the sika, which are non-native. Scotland’s red deer in particular is the largest wild land mammal. They’re very impressive, they’re very beautiful, very well-known animals, and for a lot of reasons they’re a real asset to Scotland. They’re an important part of the rural economy, the culture, they’re an important part of the biodiversity, and a source of healthy wild meat. But that’s all good when it’s at appropriate and sustainable levels. When their numbers are high…

Emily: When they’re getting a little too frisky…

Jess: Yeah, they have a real negative impact on the landscape. There’s no natural predators to keep those numbers in check. So it means their numbers can just keep growing, and they have negative impacts such as preventing new trees from growing, damaging existing woodland, overgrazing, trampling peatland. So all these bad things that are bad for carbon, biodiversity, that kind of thing. But they also cause risks to both themselves and to humans as well through increased road traffic accidents. And because there’s so many of them, they can starve over winter as well.

Emily: So we’ve got a lot of deer hanging out up in Scotland, and we need to have a way to sort of manage it. What is the Scottish Government doing to keep all of these deer in check?

Jess: Because there are no natural predators, as I’ve said, deer must be managed to keep their populations in check. So there’s an annual cull in Scotland where trained people shoot and kill deer. No one knows exactly how many get killed every year, but it’s more than 100,000 every year. So a lot of deer are killed. But this is arguably still not quite enough, as these negative impacts still continue to cause damage and as their numbers in places continue to grow.

So the Scottish Government have tried to tackle this issue for a really long time. But it’s really tricky because deer hunting is not embedded as a cultural practice as much as it is in other countries across Europe. And deer are not legally owned by anyone, so they can just wander as they like across properties, which really makes it hard to pin that ownership down on who should be doing this managing and how and why.

So this year, the Scottish Government have introduced the new Natural Environment Bill, and part of this gives increased regulatory power to the government to enforce these higher culls. So the aim is to increase the cull so that they get down to a sustainable enough level that they can become an asset again.

Emily: This bill, when you’re sort of putting it into the public realm, would have a lot of public consultation on it. A lot of people would have a lot of feelings about this. What did you expect to hear from the public when it came time to being like, “Hey, we’re going to do a bill where the Scottish Government is going to increase the amount of deer that they’re going to kill”?

Jess: Yeah, it was a tricky one because historically, as you can imagine, there’s been quite a lot of conflict and controversy surrounding how Scotland manages deer. It’s a sensitive topic. It’s tied to land use, it’s tied to culture, ecology, politics. As well as that, it’s tied to livelihoods as well, where people have lived on the land for many years, managed their land for many years, and suddenly external people are telling them how to manage their land.

So in one respect, we expected quite a lot of backlash because of this sort of historical controversy. However, we did a study in 2021 that found that people were generally supportive of culling deer in Scotland, so long as it was in support of some public good. So, for example, to store more carbon or to help deer welfare or to provide sustainable meat.

So we actually weren’t really sure what we would find because we had these sort of two positive and negative feeds coming together where before there’s been quite a lot of backlash, or there’s a perception of backlash. But actually in 2021 we found that the public may be supportive of it if it serves public goods.

Emily: Well, you are a woman of research. You like to get into it. So how did you actually sort of break down and look into what camp was more popular? What was the actual sentiment of public opinion?

Jess: So to really try and drill down on what different people thought about this issue, we did a large online experiment. We got a stratified sample of the Scottish public to try and get as representative a group of people as we could.

Every participant read a short passage about deer culling. So this short passage was meant to give people a little bit of information so everyone was on the same page, and to introduce the issue. So to let them know about the increased cull, to let them know a little bit about deer and deer background.

But then also we strategically tweaked different elements of this passage to try and really drill down into which kinds of justifications for the cull and which elements of information that people are shown would influence perceptions. So, for example, we had this general passage at the start and then would tweak whether people were told that increasing the cull was, for example, because it can help store more carbon, or it can help protect biodiversity, or it might help deer welfare or human health and safety, for example.

So people were shown different justifications and they were also shown different images. We wanted to test this just because of the sheer rise of deer management and deer culling in the media, and it’s very topical. The legislation is changing. And also, in general, there’s a rise of this visual short-form content online where people get their information. So we also showed people different images. One had slightly healthier-looking deer with a healthy backdrop. One had a less healthy-looking deer with a less healthy-looking backdrop, to see if these different images elicited different kinds of perceptions about increasing the cull.

After they’d read this little passage and seen the different images and the different justifications, we then asked them how acceptable or unacceptable it would be to increase the vehicle in Scotland. We also asked them different demographic questions so that we could really pin down what kinds of people might have these different perceptions. So, for example, gender identities and age and social identities. So, for example, we might be able to see whether people who identify as male or female might have different perceptions over others…

Emily: Or people who live in rural or urban environments might have different perceptions than each other.

Jess: Exactly, exactly.

Emily: And what you found, was it sort of lining with what you expected to find, or were there any surprises in there?

Jess: Most of them were as we predicted. The slight surprise we had was rural and urban people. So there’s generally a perception in Scotland that people from rural and urban backgrounds would have quite differing opinions on these issues. But what we found actually, and this was supported by the 2021 study, was that there was no real difference between what rural and urban populations thought. Generally, it was acceptable across both kinds of people. So that was really interesting.

Emily: So there was a sort of strong support for culling deer for conservation reasons.

Jess: There was strong support for culling deer across all of these reasons. So conservation, yes, for helping biodiversity, for protecting peatlands, for holding more carbon in the soil, for example, but also across deer welfare reasons. So if we said, “We’ll increase the cull so that fewer deer starve and die over winter,” for example, people were also accepting of that. And they were also accepting of whether or not it was for human health and safety too, so there’ll be fewer road traffic accidents. So they were accepting across all these different reasons, which was interesting.

Emily: So this is just one case study in Scotland. How do you sort of broaden this approach out? Our big question today is, should you kill animals for conservation? That feels quite loaded in a question itself to even put out there.

Jess: Yeah. There’s no shortage of controversial conservation issues across the world where difficult decisions like these have to be made, whether to kill for conservation, whether to increase the cull, whether to move animals around, what animals should we prioritise over others. So these issues span across culling, for example, culling elephants, culling hedgehogs, kangaroos, in lots of different political and ecological landscapes, but also other controversial issues like carnivore reintroductions or restricting access to protected areas, for example.

So I think the real value from this kind of approach is understanding really what people think about proposed changes and decisions is really crucial for whether we can predict whether policies are going to be successful or serve public interests. And it’s not only important to understand what the public think, but to really drill down into the why as well, so that hopefully those policies and the decisions made in the future can reflect this.

I’m trying to take this research further in my PhD with looking more at the social psychology behind these perceptions and trying to really drill these questions that we ask people down into the biological reality as well. So not just presenting quite abstract questions, but also giving people different scenarios to choose between that might be realistic management options.

Emily: So is the real question, what is the social line that people then draw amongst themselves when it comes to actually culling animals for the sake of conservation?

Jess: Yeah, I think the real question we should be asking is, where is that line and why is that line where it is, and what do people prioritise in terms of the ecology, the policy, the culture? And asking people what they think is really key to this and finding creative ways to understand what people think and why people think that, and to try and target different kinds of groups of people is really important for that.

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Emily: This podcast was brought to you by Oxford Sparks from the University of Oxford, with music by John Lyons, and a special thanks to Jessica Frater.

Emily: Tell us what you think about this podcast. We are on the internet at Oxford Sparks, or you can go to our website, OxfordSparks.ox.ac.uk.

Emily: I’m Emily Elias. Bye for now.