Royal Park or Deer Farm?
22 Oct 2023
London’s royal parks are great places to experience the outdoors within city limits. Richmond and Bushy in particular are huge and have a large population of free roaming deer who can be admired. While large for a park in a city, these also receive a huge number of visitors. As such both parks are managed, by “The Royal Parks” charity.
Going to these for the first time, I was excited to see deer there without a fence between us. It’s truly wonderful seeing them eat, run, rest, lay down in the tall grass with only their antlers sticking out, or rolling in the mud and having fun together akin to what you’d typically expect from pigs. No doubt, having deer around is a great benefit to the parks’ human visitors.
The Dark Side
Yet, how great is the benefit to the deer? A couple times per year, the parks close in the evenings to the public, and hunters come out instead. The parks are open about the culling they perform then. What is not typically communicated however, is the sheer scale of this…
The number of deer killed by culling is staggering. About a third of the deer are culled each year! It turns out that 94% of the deer in these parks ultimately die by culling [1]. Of course, after that their carcasses are sold on for meat. Not the best deal for deer then. With these numbers these aren’t royal parks, they are subsidised free-range deer farms.
Why
The Royal Parks give a reason for the culling on their website [2]:
If the herd size was not managed food would become scarce, and more animals would ultimately suffer. Without population control there would be other welfare issues such as low body fat, malnutrition and high incidence of death from exposure to cold in winter.On the face of it, this makes sense. Some sort of population control is needed. Yet, their reason for not using contraceptives instead reads as a flimsy excuse.
Non hormonal immunocontraceptives can be used on some zoo animals and have been used on moorland ponies in the UK, but they must be injected. Wild deer cannot be rounded up or handled without causing severe stress and possible injury.Causing "severe stress and possible injury" is clearly no valid justification to inflict "severe stress and definite injury of dying, losing family members and friends to a hunter, and the certain severe injury of being shot."
A non-lethal approach would raise cost and take away a valuable source of income. Management of the deer individually may be too hard for the current numbers. Yet that only means that managing the deer at the current levels is already too much. The current herd size is convenient for park visitors and hunters, not for the deer.
Natural deaths
With 94% of deer deaths coming from culling, that does not mean that the remaining 6% all die of old age. Many die by other human activities, such as being hit by a car or even a cyclist, getting trapped in discarded plastic/rope, or a baby being picked up by the public and then left by the mother. So what proportion die to natural deaths?
Rutting can cause male deer to lock horns to establish dominance, some years this can cause lethal injuries to some of the participants and some are so badly hurt that they are euthanised. 0.8% of deer die due to rutting injuries, on average. The only other category in the data that can include natural deaths is one where the cause of death could not be determined. This goes for 1.1% of the deer. Adding these up, the number of deer in the royal parks who die of natural causes is at most 1.9%.
On-farm deaths
Let’s put that into perspective, and look at how farm animals score on these metrics. On dairy farms about 5% of cows die unintentionally every year [3]. Estonian beef farms saw 2.1% of their cows die unintentional per year, comparable to other beef herds [4]. In young preweaning pigs alone, unintended mortality is 11% on English farms [5]. Broilers (chickens raised for meat) clock in at around 7.5% even in their short 6-8 week life [6].
In other words, a deer born in the royal parks has a similar, if not higher, chance to be killed and sold for meat than a cow, broiler chicken or pig born on a farm designed to raise them for this purpose.
Age
With the numbers culled, and the total number of deer in the parks, we can estimate the age of the average deer when they are culled. Note that the numbers below are from different years, with deer numbers from 2023 and culling numbers from 2017-2021. Assuming the population is stable, as the management suggests, this should still be reasonably accurate.
The parks have a combined 950 deer [2]. Per year on average 317 die [1]. This means the average age of the animals when they die is only about 3 years old. Compare that to a lifespan of 15 years with limited predation for the red deer [7], or 12-16 years of the fallow deer [8].
Conclusion
It is very hard to see the deer again. The wonder and enjoyment I had before is still there. Yet it is tainted by the knowledge that, just as with other farmed animals grazing on a pasture, they are all youngsters and almost all will fall victim to the meat industry…