Will British Farming Pay the Price for Rewilding? (Your Radical Questions with Derek Gow)

**John Byrne Murdoch** (0:08)
Hello, I'm John Byrne Murdoch, and welcome to Your Radical Questions, where we put your questions to one of our guests. This is your chance to engage directly with the radical people we have on this podcast, and ask them about their ideas for the future. I've still got Derek Gow with me, the British farmer, conservationist, author, and rewilder. Derek's long been an outspoken advocate of large-scale species reintroductions, and on his farm in Devon, he breeds animals which were once native to Britain, like wild boar, beavers, water vol, and even wild cats, with the hope that one day these species will roam free again.
We talked about all that and more in our latest episode, so if you haven't heard that conversation yet, please do go back and listen. But now Derek is here to answer the radical questions that you've sent in. So Derek, thanks again for being here.

**Derek Gow** (0:53)
Thank you for having me.

**John Byrne Murdoch** (0:55)
Our first question is from Matthew, who sent us this voice note.

**Matthew** (0:58)
Hi Derek, I'm a deer stalker, and I manage deer partly because if I didn't, the woodland regeneration you're describing simply wouldn't happen.
Britain has more deer now than at any point in a thousand years, and no links or walls to check them. So doesn't rewilding actually depend on more human intervention, not less? The places most of us think of as wild, the highlands, the lakes, the national parks, are wild because keepers, stalkers, and rangers work them year round to keep them that way. Isn't the honest picture that wilderness in Britain is something people maintain, not something we step back from?

**John Byrne Murdoch** (1:41)
Derek, any thoughts on that one?

**Derek Gow** (1:43)
Yeah. I mean, it's quite simply, of course, we need to manage deer. We're not managing deer very well. So if you look at the landscapes he portrays where deer are, red deer in particular, commonly kept in very high numbers to ensure that stocking as a sport is practiced because it's so economically valuable for the estates, then in their own right, commonly these environments retain very many more deer than the land can sustain. And you can't get woodland regeneration because things that red deer are there in such high numbers that at the end of it, all the trees can't grow. So that's part of the story too. It's not as simplistic as the question suggests. Added to that, you then come down to the lowlands of England, and go over to Lincolnshire, and you see those fallow deer existing in numbers that is virtually reminiscent of things like wildebeest migrations. So the crossing, things like motorways, in their hundreds, if not their thousands, is stopping the flow of traffic. I can't remember the exact figures, but I'm pretty sure when I did the book on the shadow wolf, that you're looking at some of the 200 deaths a year and or life-changing injuries and accidents, road accidents with deer in Britain every year. And then there's an estimated 74,000 other collisions with deer every year. It is a huge problem. We definitely need to kill more deer. And we need to kill more deer, probably not just in a jolly hockey sticks type way, where we go out and black them with a rifle on top of a mountain. But we maybe start to think about feeding them into corrals in the winter time, in numbers, and then running them up races and bolt gunning them. At the end of it all, we're not on top of the deer situation in Britain at all, and that again boils down to government. You know, it's a national problem. It's not going to waive both from an environmental point of view and from a human damage point of view. And really, it's probably high time we actually go to the stage as a professional guild of people employed by government just to kill deer, regardless of sporting interests which you'd set to one side. But the other point that Matthew is making with regard to management, if you look at countries like the Netherlands, well, the Netherlands are a much more developed environment than Britain. There are wolves in the Netherlands. And the wolves came naturally. They were never this idea that anybody other than a very obscure project in Georgia many decades ago, the wolves within Europe have been reintroduced as nonsense. The wolves have basically come from the East with the protection that was accorded them under the terms of the Berne Convention. Wolves play a role in deer control by moving deer. They create a situation whereby the deer can't languish at ease in the rich and environments where they just like to bum about scoffing trees and shrubs. And because the wolves are there, these animals have to be aware of the fact that predators are there and move, move, move to avoid them. But the principle impact of wolves on things that deer populations is, is the impact they have on the old animals which are lame or ill or whatever else. And in the numbers of young animals they catch and kill. Wolves don't really regulate deer populations. In regard to lynx, they have the same effect on making game animals move in different ways through the environment. Their impact is pretty much the same as the wolf.