Butchery in the Glens
It is well over a year since the Secretary of State for Scotland appointed a committee of sensible and experienced persons to look into various problems affecting red deer in Scotland (one of the problems was whether or not the deer should be protected by a close season, as they are in every other civilised country in the world). I do not know how many more months are going to elapse before the committee presents its report, nor what further delay is likely to occur before the Government decides what action, if any, to take in the light of it; but a letter from a head-stalker whom I know well gives some idea of what, in the absence of any effective legislation to deter poachers, happens to the deer when the hard weather drives them down within range of the roads. " There has been," he writes, " some more poaching in Glen . . . and Glen . . . on the National Trust side, they got eleven in one night using the headlights on a swivel. I don't hear anything of the poaching bill, it looks as though it is going to be shelved." If they got ' eleven, they certainly wounded several more. Surely its time that this particular game was made not worth the candle ?
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