Murder in the Glens
IT is a well-established literary convention that the poacher is a sympathetic character. People who write about the country invest him with a raffish glamour and credit him with many primitive skills in taking game and a Robin Hood- like resource in outwitting gamekeepers and police. 'Old Simon gave me a scarcely perceptible wink as he slipped out of the bar with his lurcher at his heels. The full moon. I remembered, would be rising about now. . . .' How many times have we read sentences like that?
Good old Simon! Or should it perhaps be good olde Simon? So conveniently picturesque a figure would be a sad loss to rustic belles !ewes, but does he in fact exist any more, this lone, ruse, clandestine hunter threading the moonlit rides? Here and there he may; but most modern poachers arc motorised townsmen, operating in impersonal gangs, using a smash-and-grab technique and running very little risk of being caught. They do not favour literary gentlemen with scarcely perceptible winks, and for my part 1 do not find them estimable or sympathetic.
* The only poacher who hardly ever gets written about is the deer-poacher. He is not a picturesque figure. Some idea of his standard methods may be gained from the report of the Nature Conservancy for 1955.
The most serious incident during the year took place on the Beinn Eighe Nature Reserve where deer-poaching still continues, despite the vigilance of the Reserve Warden, Mr. J. Poison, and the local Police Constable. On 23rd March, 1955, at about 3.45 a.m. shots were heard on the Reserve and a car was shortly afterwards intercepted. Two men were in the car, one describing himself as a farm worker and the other as a gamekeeper. In the rear were two stags, one on top of the other. The one on top had eight bullets in it— two in the haunch, three through the stomach, one through the lung, one through the nose and one through the antler. This stag was dead. The one underneath had had one bullet through the right eye passing between the brain and the roof of the mouth. It was still alive nearly an hour after being shot, but paralysed, and was put out of its misery by the warden. One of the men was charged and convicted under the Firearms Act, 1937, and the Game Licences Act, 1860, and find £10 on the first charge and £15 on the second. The other was convicted under the latter Act only and was fined £15. . . . For one of the men this was the second con- viction in three years and for the other man, the third con- viction within the same period. . . . It is difficult to estimate what is the value of a stag to a poacher, but somewhere in the region of £10 would seem a reasonable estimate, and on that assumption the fines levied approximately equalled double the value of the two stags in this case.
* * * On this jolly incident the following comments may be made. First, the only unusual thing about it was that the poachers were caught. Second, nothing was or could be said about the number of deer wounded but not recovered during the shooting; the deer are generally in a herd when fired on and casualties of this kind are almost always inflicted, especially if the shooting is done at night. Thirdly, the men were not fined because of anything they had done to the deer, but because one of their firearms certificates was not in order and neither of them had game licences.
Bird's-nesting is illegal, but to kill or disable a stag, a hind or even a calf is not in itself an offence. The red deer is the largest wild animal in these islands, but the law does not recognise it as either having a right to or needing protection. Although in many of her overseas possessions the larger mammals are protected by sensible and enlightened game laws, Great Britain is the only civilised country in the world where there is no close season for deer.
There are several interrelated reasons why nothing continues to be done about this minor national disgrace. One is that, although every year more and more people visit the Highlands. hardly any of them ever see the deer. In July. August and September, when public opinion streams along the roads in cars and coaches, the deer look down on it incuriously from two or three thousand feet up; they are not part of the visible landscape, as ponies are in the New Forest. The result is that good-hearted people, who are quite ready to get hot under the collar about what happens in public to bulls in Spain (where they have never been), remain intellectually and emotionally isolated from what may well be happening this evening to deer on the knoll where they ate their sandwiches last summer.
A more cogent factor is the attitude of an articulate minority of farmers, headed at the moment by the Black-Faced Sheep Breeders' Association. Their case, which is based on specious economics, rooted in shallow ideology and unsupported by any evidence worth hearing, is that deer are vermin, and that a close season, which would probably arrest the decline in their numbers, would do a major disservice to Scottish agri- culture; the only gainers would be the beastly people who own deer-forests and a few sentimental cranks.
Since the enemies of the deer greatly outnumber in voting power their friends, the whole business represents what is known as a 'delicate' political issue; this means an issue which successive administrations feel they have almost every excuse for funking. But what is done to the deer is abominable and against all our traditions; and it is what is done that matters. I see from its report that last year the Nature Conservancy had some success in preserving in their natural state such items in our heritage as Fossiliferous Mudstones, Green Spleenwort, Bloody Cranesbill, Broad-leaved Ragwort, Marsh Andromeda, the Black Hairsteak, the Chequered Skipper, and some particularly interesting sedge and ling. 1 am relieved to know that these by-products of Dame Nature stand a good chance of surviving; but 1 cannot see that, either from a national or an humanitarian point of view, the Broad-leaved Ragwort stands in greater need of conservation than an
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