Why oh why is Scotland the only country in the UK to still have the ban on tail docking of working dogs?
Just back in from ferreting a plantation of young larch and scots pine trees. I am soaked to the skin and frozen. My daughter is visiting us with her boyfriend and I thought it would be a good chance for him to see some different animal tracks in the snow.
I am not a happy chappy. I was cutting old rabbit fences away this morning and my ear is bleeding profusely. I detest that high tensile wire; when you cut it with the wire cutters it goes off like a coiled spring. It felt like I had been shot in the ear.
Step through the front door into John Waters house and there’s no mistaking what makes the man tick. The clues are all around on the walls; skulls of kudu shot in Namibia, two wild boar tusks from Sweden, feral goat heads from Scotland and in pride of place on a sideboard a couple of warthog tusks from KwaZulu-Natal.
Scotland's red stags and the deer stalking industry are threatened by plans to scrap the closed season and allow year-round shooting, gamekeepers have warned.
Landowners told The Times that proposals drawn up by the Deer Commission, the body set up to manage and protect the breed, and being considered by the Scottish government, strip away the protection which the animal enjoys and relegate the beasts to the status of vermin.
I’ve spent a lot of my time these last few weeks arguing why the Deer Commission for Scotland (DCS) shouldn’t make my job a whole lot easier. In its wisdom it is proposing there should be no close season for stags. That, of course, would mean I could have a nice long rest all summer then just saunter out after the rut when the stags are absolutely exhausted and take my whole year’s cull without any effort at all. They’d barely be capable of running away and would just have to stand and watch as I took aim. Couldn’t be simpler.
The myth that Highland poaching is a gentle romantic pastime has been exposed by a team of professional stalkers in Wester Ross who had to humanely destroy a red deer hind which had been seriously wounded by the razor barbs of a poacher’s arrow.
The heavily pregnant hind, which also had a dependant calf, was found on the boundary of three estates, and the stalkers from Inverbroom, Dundonnell and Guinard who turned out to ensure the animal was put out of its misery were upset and furious that callous poachers had caused it hours or even days of suffering.