Clause 6 - Deer
Hunting Bill
2:30 pm
Mr Edward Garnier (Harborough, Conservative)
The Minister will understand that I am relaying to the Committee concerns expressed by the owner of the Porlock estate. I am asking him to assure me—and, through me, the owner of the Porlock estate and those who live on the Exmoor deer land—how the strong genetic diversity of the Exmoor red deer can best be conserved. How will natural selection be preserved if the use of guns to control red deer and others is done without sufficient understanding of all the various qualities in wild red deer necessary for successful breeding of those deer in a busy holiday landscape?
I also asked whether the shooting of red deer had escalated recently on Exmoor, particularly on the land owned by the National Trust. I said that my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire had mentioned that this morning. Both he and my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton referred to the land owned by the League Against Cruel Sports—where there is, I believe, no shooting and certainly no hunting—and said that there were question marks about the health and diversity of that herd. Before widespread shooting, the wild red deer stood proudly on hillsides and surveyed holidaymakers confidently, but the deer are now timid, more secretive and possibly scarcer. The red deer is the emblem of many aspects of Exmoor's life. Would that remain true if the largely healthy, alert, wild red deer population became invisible?