Earlier this week, I made my annual pilgrimage to the Cairngorms National Park to go deer stalking, an activity I was introduced to in the 1990s and quickly fell in love with. There are few better feelings than seeing a stag in your rifle’s telescopic sight, his antlers silhouetted against the skyline, having stalked the beast for several hours, much of it on your belly. It’s a challenging sport and not just because of the physical discomfort. Red deer can see, hear and smell you from thousands of yards away, so there’s no alternative but to sneak up on them downwind.

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Some people will recoil at the thought of deriving pleasure from shooting such a majestic animal, but if they’re not killed by the ‘guests’, they’ll be shot by the professional stalkers employed by the estates or the park rangers. In 2020, the Deer Working Group, which was set up by the Scottish government, recommended that there should be a maximum of ten red deer per square kilometre over large areas of open range, and an estimated 200,000 are culled every year – more now that the SNP government has scrapped seasonal restrictions,........

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