Paper short abstract:

This paper will investigate the role of heritage as a form of legitimacy within the management of "wild" deer. This legitimacy appears to be conceived in parallel by multiple competing actors, upon a logic of a predetermined and symbiotic balance which is realised in the right to kill the deer.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will explore the conceptions that are used to inform the conservation efforts of deer-managers, and particularly the emerging competitions and challenges to traditional practices.

For the last millennia, deer have been maintained in the "parks" and forests of Great Britain. Through the medieval sovereign granting the right to deny the free movement of deer in the form of the deer-park, vast hierarchical structures were formed across the British landscape. In successfully maintaining a "natural balance" within these parks, the continuity of the deer would also allow the continuity of the heritage of the family that held it. The modern deer-manager has inherited these responsibilities, and the deer are understood as a form of "living heritage", a pre-existing ideal that relies on the manager removing unsuitable factors within the herd, and external to it. Yet in identifying and removing threats and predation, it would seem that the remaining humans would become entrusted with recreating the effects of the predation that they removed. And this conception of man as predator has become a site of legal and illegal contests to deer-manager's legitimacy.

Furthermore, in recent years, new methods were developed to establish deer farms, which has caused many to regard the practices of wild deer management as irresponsible and their methodologies as wantonly outdated. With deer farms now springing up around Europe, how does the treatment of deer as property have for not only legislation and practices, but also for accepted views of domestication, wildness and interspecies interactions?