browny823
Member
- Location
- Lancashire
Anyone know of anyone selling hinds/calfs in Scotland? aparantly deer farmings getting popular in Scotland and the whole UK and people finding it hard to buy stock.
Red hinds
- Thread starter browny823
- Start date
browny823
Member
- Location
- Lancashire
Don't ask twice I'll be there with a trailer and catch them[emoji23][emoji23]
- Location
- Fife
Hundreds of wild ones here I would be more than happy for you to take away
What's the law on live selling wold deer?
Haven't a clue but guessing most of the farmed ones would have come from wild stock initially. Also if your aloud to shoot them on your land then trapping them alive can't be much of a step away from that. Probably some laws re transport and capture but I would think it's possible. I do know they do it in NZ
llamedos
New Member
@jellybean may be of help here.
- Location
- South West
Same here as TB is rife in themHundreds of wild ones here I would be more than happy for you to take away
- Location
- Highland
I was going to keep clear of this one but since you ask.
Firstly the legality of the situation is for you to determine; I have feeling that you might need a license from Natural England to catch wild deer nowadays.
In many situations catching deer is easy, dealing with them after enclosing them is a different matter. Which species, how many, number of antlered males, obvious health status etc will all have a bearing on the next move.
On one farm that had a lot of fallow deer eating crops I built a 20 acre catch pen and a rudimentary handling system, just good enough to pen up and load out. From memory we closed the gates on 40 or so and the next morning there were more than 60 in there. (how they got in is specialist knowledge, available at a price
)Over the next 8-10 years close to 1,000 deer were taken from that pen. This reduced the crop damage considerably and the sale of the deer paid for the facilities in the first 2 years.
We have done similar with red deer but I am talking 30 years ago and I was young, fit and strong and happy to jump in and de-antler wild stags.
Now for some observations. Truly wild deer do not take well to being removed from their known environment and put somewhere strange. Most likely they will continually walk the fences trying to get out, or worse, keep throwing themselves at the fence and injure or kill themselves. In this process they are losing weight rapidly
and lowering their immune systems therefore becoming susceptible to the outbreak of any latent disease they may already have or putting themselves at risk of picking up anything else that they would normally have been able to fight off.
There are normally 2 reasons to catch; one is just to get the deer into a smaller area so that shooting them out is "easier". In practice this can make things worse because when you start shooting all hell breaks loose and they will be next to impossible.
The second reason is what the OP probably had in mind, stocking a deer farm. Yes, of course it has been done and it can be done well enough in some situations to be ok. BUT usually many of the deer do not make the transition from wild to enclosed. Many will just pine away, fence walk and eventually succumb to an illness or social stress. Deer have very strong social structure and upsetting that can be fatal in a worst case scenario. Even on my farm which has been going for 37 years and everything has been born here I do not move females from one group to another until they are at least 3 years old.
Sorry to be so long winded but anybody who is contemplating doing this needs to be aware of the pitfalls and to remember that you have a responsibility to the animals.
Thanks for the info @jellybean i made the suggestion very tongue in cheek, I do know it's been done in the past round here successfully and how to do it but like you say that was forty years ago and things have changed.