Reduced Deer
In some particularly acute and interesting notes on changes in Scotland, both historic and new, Julian Huxley (in the Countryman) suggests, indeed proves, that the red deer have dwindled in size, since they took to an open instead of a forest life. When I was in New Zealand I was amazed by the size of the red deer—though in those wonderful islands you expect everything to be big, from trees to trout and hares. They so flourished, largely on a diet of the tips of tree branches, that at the time of my visit they were officially listed in some districts as vermin ; and it became legal to kill them by any means, even poison. Neverthe- less even there the deer, like the trout, were observed to lose stature when they became over numerous and both had to be reduced in numbers, The Scottish deer-forest (now no longer wooded) has for very many years been the occasion for much impassioned rhetoric from urban critics of the left ; and it has usually been argued that farm animals, if not farm crops, should take their place. There seems to be small doubt that the ruin of large areas of Scotland has been due not to deer but to sheep, which have proved as fatal an influence as goats on the shores of the Mediterranean. They have brought about some of the very few instances of serious denudation within this island.
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