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Paper short abstract:

Approaching animals as embedded within landscape assemblages enables an understanding of local populations as distinct groups with their own histories. This paper draws on fieldwork, archives and scientific literature to look at the shaping of Highland red deer ways of life through landscape change.

Paper long abstract:

Red deer herds living in the Scottish Highlands today find themselves ensnared in a mirror-crisis to more common Anthropocene woes. Unlike many wild animals, they thrived through nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial monocultures, selected as they were by big-game hunters as a prize species to be preserved in a landscape managed in their favour. Instead, it is contemporary environmentalist attempts to right the wrongs of the past and bring back pre-Anthropocene landscapes that threaten red deer ways of life. While in the current crisis moment the Scottish government pushes for higher and higher deer culls and rewilding landowners dubbed ‘Green Lairds’ take drastic measures to remove deer from their hillsides, a closer look at deer landscapes reveals a pattern of displacement stretching back into the post-WWII twentieth century. Working with a Tsingian conception of landscape as a ‘moot’ of living and non-living beings (Tsing, 2017), this paper explores how the twin landscape infrastructures of deer fencing and plantation forestry have shaped and altered deer ways of life. Methodologically, it draws on fieldwork, archival sources and scientific literature to find out what happened and mattered to Highland red deer, understanding them as historically situated herds with their own ways of living within landscapes – as “life forms with a form or way of life” (Van Dooren, 2014). Ultimately, this paper follows red deer into a complex multispecies landscape history, one where recent attempts to confront a litany of past injustices, both social and environmental, are breaking and remaking animal worlds.