A guest article by Victor Clements
Introduction
Over the next few months, there will be a variety of potential new deer management provisions brought forward and debated in the Scottish Parliament.
One potential provision being floated is that crofters should be given control over deer management across their hill common grazing areas. At the moment, crofters can control deer on their individual crofts to protect grass and crops, but it is the landowner who retains any sporting rights on the open hill. There is certainly at least the potential for conflict, and this can often present itself in reality as well.
Many politicians will see this as a land reform measure, and their instinct will be to support the crofters against their landlords. You would expect to see this in the political environment we have in Scotland. But the outcomes will vary in different locations. Some of these may be positive, but others will certainly not be.
Crofting tenure
Much of the north and west of Scotland is covered by crofting tenure. Crofting legislation is actually very powerful, and gives crofters a lot of rights as well as flexibility, and though changes are often debated in parliament, it has actually stood the test of time pretty well.
It has helped maintain populations of people in our more remote. Most crofters are employed doing something else, or have a range of jobs, and will get a small proportion of their income from the land, but crofts vary greatly in size, and some will be significant farming operations, particularly if someone is working multiple crofts, or is making good use of their common resources.
In other cases, agricultural activity will be minimal. In all cases, the important resource is the house, and from this, the community that exists around you. Politically, crofters are quite strong, and aspiring councillors or MSPs have to be aware of how far they can push things.
In terms of land use, crofters have their own croft to farm or make use of exclusively as they see fit, and they will have shares in the common grazings along with other crofters in their township. The common grazings can be very extensive, often the size of a small estate, with management decisions taken by a common grazings committee. Some common grazings see minimal use, but crofters will defend their rights to use it. Others are well used and can allow crofters to keep significant numbers of livestock, far beyond what their individual croft would allow them to do. Crofters have the right to plant trees if they want to and retain those within their lease.
Not all estates are crofted, and those which are not have a lot more flexibility about what they can do. If there is any long-standing conflict with crofters on an estate, it can be very difficult for the landowner to do anything much at all. They may own the sporting rights, but how well they can implement these depends on what might be going on beneath the surface. If you think northern Scotland is the very picture of rural tranquility, that is not always the case in practice.
Estates might have no crofting tenure, or be crofted in part, or in whole. There may be just one township area, or multiple numbers. The more crofting areas you have, the more complex the local politics will be. Some crofting areas have community or crofting landlords now. Crofting landlords represent those with crofting interests, and these are not the same as community landowning groups, who represent the whole community, whether they have crofting rights or not. People will soon tell you if you use the wrong word to describe their situation.
Scottish Ministers own significant areas of crofted land, as do some of the environmental groups. Private landlords own the greater part of the area. Many have a positive and constructive relationship with their crofters. With others, there can be a lot of history, and crofters tend to have long memories.
Deer can often bring tensions to the surface, and the conflict which can arise from this can be real enough.
Deer dynamics
As with other areas in Scotland, deer will stay out the hill for much of the summer and autumn months, but in the early spring, grass will grow on the crofts first, because they are the most fertile areas. Grass in the spring months is proportionately much more valuable than at other times of year, particularly in our more remote areas where external feeding is much more expensive. A few deer on your fields can be an irritation, greater numbers can be a serious problem, particularly if the summer growth is slow to arrive, and the deer are hanging around for a long time.
Deer eat grass and other crops, but they also trample and break fences and walls. Often, this is what can really irritate people. The deer density in a local area can be fairly low, but if they are all in your field, there will certainly seem to be a lot. Deer herds of 100+ animals are often possible. They don’t live in groups of this size, but they can congregate to form these larger numbers when going to feed, and this gives them more pairs of eyes for vigilance and makes them feel safer.
The smell of grass is very strong indeed, and deer will move for many miles to access it. When summer growth appears on the mountain, the period of strain tends to pass, or at least becomes more bearable. In most areas, this tension happens every year, to a greater or lesser extent. It probably stops many crofters from doing things that they might otherwise do if the deer were not there. The deer do exist of course, and even crofters accept they are part of the culture and economy of their area.
A lopsided relationship?
What do you do when deer come through the hill dyke into your croft to eat grass or do you some other damage? You can shoot them, but if your area is small, and they come in a big group, the damage can be done in a few nights. It might be better to control the deer on the hill within your common grazing, but how does that work if your landlord sees a value in them, and wants to keep them, and only he has the right to shoot out there? Is this a relationship that can never work? You can see where the thought of changing the law comes from.
It seems to me that the relationship is not as lopsided as you might first imagine, and there are many ambiguities and nuances around it.
To start with, a significant proportion of estate stalkers in the north and west of Scotland come from the crofting community themselves. They probably took an interest in the red deer coming into their croft fields to graze as children, got time to watch and study them, and got their first chance to have a shot at them there. When you have done it once, you probably want to do it again, and you will learn quickly about the goodwill and income you will get from your neighbours from doing so.
This makes the best of these people good potential employees for estates. More widely, shepherds, office staff, ghillies and tradespeople tend to come from the local crofting community. This means that estates have a feel for the crofting areas and the people who live there. When they have a problem with deer, they can sympathize with the crofters, and in my experience, most stalkers will try and help resolve a local deer problem where they can, and most crofters will recognize when someone is doing their best to help them.
It works the other way as well. Crofters know that local estates are a source of employment, giving opportunities to family members. If there is a fox killing their lambs, the estate stalker is usually the best person to deal with that. In a community where police are rarely seen, it is often estate workers and stalkers who are out and about and are first to see if something looks suspicious. This provides a function for the wider community. Crofters understand that stalkers need deer to have employment, filling a role that would not otherwise exist. For this reason, many will bite their lip a bit if they are suffering damage, just as estates have to bite their lips a bit if a certain amount of poaching is taking place. There needs to be a bit of toleration, although in some years, this can be tested to the limit.
Deer rights
What would happen if crofters got the rights to shoot deer on their common grazings? As is often the case, situations vary, and the answer is: it depends.
My experience is that when crofters get access to stalking rights through crofting or community buyouts, they usually tend not to change things too much, and there is very good reason for this.
Image by Bill Cowie
The stag above might well be grazing your grass or your woodland area, but if you have one in your freezer already and you have to sell it, it might only be worth £50, maybe less. The same animal in September or October might now be worth £1000-1200. If you can realize that because the rights now lie with you, then you will think twice before killing it in March for £50 and reducing its value by 95 percent or more.
If your hill grazing is marginal for livestock, with minimal or no income, but with administrative and maintenance costs, then an animal worth £1000 is now going to be worth paying attention to. Is this a resource that you can manage sustainably, and give yourself an ongoing and steady income? If you think it might be something that will work for you, then the right thing to do is to be a bit more tolerant of any grazing damage, and to try and plan your other activities around the deer a bit more.
The other aspect to this is that income from deer tends to be more flexible. A lot of community and grant funding is restricted in nature and can only be used for certain purposes. Deer income can be used for whatever you want or saved for another day. It is flexible, and proportionately much more valuable to a local community.
Not understanding such things, government will think that if you give crofters and local communities rights over deer, that they will reduce their populations, helping restore woodland and other local habitats. In reality, income in the here and now is better than jam tomorrow. I know of five crofting or community groups who, when given the opportunity, retained exactly the same deer population that there was before, or even allowed them to increase a bit. And, as we know, they will defend their rights to manage their resources as they see fit, more strongly than a landlord might be able to.
If there is a genuine problem with deer numbers, it may be logical and economic to reduce them.
You can look at all this and say, “Well, OK, let the people decide what is right for them in their circumstances”. Give them the responsibility, and accept the decisions made, whatever they are. Is there anything wrong with that?
The downside is that transferring powers will certainly create anxiety among those employed by estates. It is true that in some community buyouts, that former estate staff have simply changed employers from the former landlord, to a new community owner. In many cases, this has worked well enough, and I know some areas which have rejuvenated or increased their sporting income. If your estate has one grazing committee, it might work fine.
But what if your estate is covered by several grazing areas, perhaps with different views in how the sporting rights are administered, or at what level? That fragmentation could see the end of your job. You might still be well placed to provide a stalking function on a proportion of the area, but you will need something else to sustain you the rest of the time, which may or may not be possible. You may lose your house if the estate can no longer employ you. You may or may not be able to find another one. Whether possible or not, you will certainly be anxious about that. Your estate itself might decide it no longer has a function, in which case, anyone else employed or contracted there will be anxious too. It might be OK if you have only one grazing committee to work to, but no-one can work for multiple bosses.
There is no doubt that fragmentation of the deer resource will quickly become a problem, and in this case, there will be losers. If no fragmentation exists, you can say that it is better for the local community to have the deer income rather than an estate, but in terms of the local economy, there is probably little difference. Most of the money will end up in local shops and facilities anyway, whoever the employer is.
What to do?
Ultimately, this is a land reform decision, not a deer management one, and I don’t get involved in land reform debates, although I do have views on the matter. What is right or wrong depends on your ethos and your ideology, but evidence and impacts within an area are important too, and ignorance and prejudice must not prevail.
The problem that will have to be grappled with is this. Is deer grazing on crofts just an irritation, or a serious strategic problem in the Highlands? My experience is that it is usually just an irritation that people will put up with, but it can escalate into something much more serious in some areas. Changing legislation will not always address that, because there are other factors at play as well.
I do think that estates and crofters understand one another, and it is wrong to portray them as being two completely separate camps with different objectives. The political activists among crofters will accentuate the negative, without doubt, but the majority of crofters do I think acknowledge that estates can provide functions and employment that they might not be able to provide for themselves, just given the different scales at which it is economical to work. This is ultimately why most people are happy to remain as crofters, and do not become owner occupiers, even though they already have the right to do this.
In the interests of not sitting on the fence, Politicians should only intervene where significant strategic problems are known to exist, as legal changes have to be applied everywhere.
Crofters already have the right to buy out their land, common grazings and all. They can do so, in a hostile manner if needs be, if they can demonstrate that current management of that land is impacting upon their ability to manage their own interests. To make that case, they have to convince their peers, not all of whom may share the same opinion. The matter would have to be decided democratically, as it should be, with each individual weighing up the pros and cons.
If deer are a significant problem in your area, or if anything else is a strategic problem for you, and your neighbours feel the same way, then you already have legislative and democratic mechanisms for doing that if you live in the crofting counties.
Do we need specific deer legislation as well? I would say no. Not in this case.
Victor Clements is a native woodland advisor working in Highland Perthshire. He advises a number of deer management groups and their members throughout the country, which includes estates under crofting tenure and areas of crofting/ community buyouts.
