Why did I do it?

Av: Paul Gerwyn Morris

Why do we need to shoot deer, they’re not dangerous to us, except if we meet one in a car, but that’s hardly their fault. How do we justify it?

Increasingly there are more and more people who wish to stop us doing it. As a professional hunter in the Oxford area – the intelligence capitol of the world possibly – I was often called by students etc to justify my actions in University debates etc. These as some of the most common replies in why we shoot deer, and the most common answers given by people who don’t.

¿ I like to hunt – You can do that with a camera.

¿ It’s a man thing – There are many female hunters, and this is the quickest way of loosing 50% of the population.

¿ It’s fun – Wrong answer, you’re a snusing hillbilly redneck!

¿ I need the food – Ended with Rema 1000 etc.

¿ I need the meat – Ok, but vegetarians survive to old age.

¿ I own a rifle – Yeah, to compensate for your small dick!

¿ They cause damage – Yes, this is true, but it only applies if you’re a Hardanger apple grower for example, and you could build a 3 m high fence around your property.

All these and more are ok as further reasons to do it, but not the main one. You need one that is irrefutable.

So why then? To understand this you must understand nature and the natural history of deer. Only humans die quietly in their beds at night. Virtually everything else is eaten. 80% of that is eaten alive, not very pleasant. So how would a deer die naturally in the wild? In an ideal world they’re taken by predators. The sick, weak, injured, those that are old, and some of the young are picked off, rarely are healthy animals taken. Now the problem in the whole of Western Europe is that the apex predator on all deer species has either been eradicated totally or reduced to such a small level that they are insignificant. This is not our fault as modern hunters, as it happened centuries ago. To suggest so is to suggest Germans my age can be responsible for the activities of a certain Mr. Hitler – irrelevant.

So how does the deer die without predation? Deer are like sheep etc, the chew their food to help digest it. So over the yeas their teeth wear out, and they are unable to feed themselves properly. This doesn’t happen over night, it’s a long drawn out affair where the animal gets weaker and weaker. Not pleasant. Disease may cut in or a very cold winter night ends it, but it’s not natural. Predators would have saved the suffering.

What we have is an expanding population. Most deer increase in number by approx 25-33% of the adult population annually. Roe deer, because they give birth to twins, can be higher than this. And to a degree a population with a health imbalance. What can we do? These are some suggested options by animal activists.

1. Replace predators – Nice but impossible. In the UK for example, with the present deer population we would require an estimated 5.000 bears and 25.000 wolves and lynxes to get them back to the approved level. Now there are not enough of them worldwide to lend us! They would certainly opt for eating sheep in an enclosed field rather than chase deer around the forest, and it would make your tour of the woods a bit hazardous!

2. Move them – If there’s too many in area A, move some to area B. Soon area B is overpopulated as well as area A again. So you’ll have to move some to C and D. Soon you’ll run out of the alphabet, and nowhere in this option do you deal with suffering.

3. Contraception – Very impractical. For obvious reasons I’m not going to run around putting condoms on stags!! And again it does nothing for the sick and weak deer etc.

So the only viable option is for us to step in and take on the role for the apex predator to alleviate suffering and control the every expanding population.

A carefully placed rifle bullet is the only humane and effective option. A good hunter should shoot the animals as would be taken in the wild. That is the sick, weak, injured, anything that is too old and a percentage of the young. Any mistakes to this are only acceptable to the degree that a small amount of healthy prime animals would die yearly anyway – fall off cliffs, drown in fjords, car accidents etc – it’s the hunter who has to live with his/her conscience! That is why a good hunter familiarizes themselves with both the animal and the rifle.

It is now well established that someone has to do something about it, so why me then? Why not the next person?

Well I’ve grown up with them, I’ve been lucky enough to watch them almost every day in the wild; even now in Norway I see them daily around the shooting range. I’ve watched deer from conception to birth, in life to death. To see the beauty of a roe buck standing in a sunlit forest glade amongst the spring flowers is a magical experience. To see two stags fighting in rut, the power, the fight for the right to mate and to imagine my Celtic ancestors at home and your Viking ancestors here probably stood in the same place and saw the same thing is humbling. To watch a fawn struggling to its feet, encouraged by its mother is to remind one of our beginnings, the struggle for life.

I shot deer with compassion, in certain circumstances for the individual or for the well being of the species as a whole, and in the knowledge that most of the time I did it very humanely.

The question to me as I put the crosshairs of the sight on a deer’s neck or hearth was not could I justify shooting that animal, but more could I justify not killing it! So I can morally justify what I did, and still do if the need arises, out of a lifelong love of nature. To do nothing and leave an animal to a potential lingering fate, for me, would be worse. I didn’t create the current situation; I just chose to deal with it.

After 20+ years of dealing with the increasing pressure of the animal rights organizations we have found that this explanation is the only one that they can’t disagree with, and is the only one most of the general non-hunting public can accept. In that respect I probably was never a deer hunter, I was a wildlife manager.

What you do is up to you. The next time you see an article in the paper by one of the animal extremists, you can choose to ignore it as the stupid ideas of some insignificant radicals, as we did 20 odd years ago, thinking they’ll go away. They don’t. They get stronger, cleverer and more politically powerful. You ignore them at your peril! You could also ignore the words of a Welshman most of you will never see. “He’s Welsh what does he know? This is Norway; this is how we do things in Norway”. We said the same, and they nearly destroyed us.

You have a chance here in Norway to fix the leak in the roof now; don’t wait like we did for the roof to collapse before trying to fix it. If shooting and fishing are banned tomorrow of course I’ll be sad, but I have enough hunting memories to last my whole lifetime. Can you say the same? The memories of shooting and fishing with my late father and uncles are my most cherished, will you deny that to your children and grandchildren? Just because you could’nt be bothered to argue? In closing I would like to say all hunters should pay heed to the wise words for one of our old kings:

“The wildlife of today is not ours to dispose of as we please. We have it on trust. We must account for it to those who come after”

King George VI

19.10.06 14:43

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