Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the system of deer park management in the United Kingdom and the practices of recognising individual deer through their flaws and colouration in order to protect the deer herd’s purity, which in turn ensures the herd’s future as well as sustains the heritage of the emparkment.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will argue that the deer that inhabit the deer parks of the United Kingdom are constructed into a plural deer, the herd, through the destruction of the individual deer, a process that is performed through the surveillance of the deer manager. Deer management within parks revolves around the population limits of their environment, which ultimately implicates the hunter's skills in maintaining as healthy a population as the local conditions can provide. Whilst non-deer species are understood to carry internal and external threats to the deer herd, the deer manager frequently attempts to embody the "best interests" of the herd by recreating the purity of natural predation through the destruction of the old, sick and weak deer. As such, the deer manager must engage in constant surveillance of factors that could challenge the deer population, including those that are understood to represent poor genetic material. Especially in Fallow Deer, such factors include antler formation, which is monitored to perpetuate the idealised buck, and coat colouration which acts as a marker of the original sovereign granted medieval emparkment. As such, the idealised deer does not necessarily represent itself, but instead embodies a mixture of the park's heritage and the future of the species, becoming unrecognisable in the presence of its fellows. Furthermore, it would seem that flaws allow individuals to exist and their agency recognisable, but the deer manager must always act to prevent these flaws from propagating in order to protect the strength and health of the species.