Best Practice

Welcome to Best Practice Guidance on the Management of Wild Deer in Scotland. The guides within this folder have been developed by Scotland’s deer sector to provide you with the best information available on wild deer management in a format that is easy to access.
At the heart of the guides is the need for clarity on the law, along with three central aims: safeguarding public safety, ensuring food safety and taking full account of deer welfare. Public confidence in these three issues is essential if wild deer management in Scotland is to maintain the understanding and respect of a wider audience at home and abroad.
The guides, produced by DCS in partnership with a steering group comprising ADMG, BASC, BDS, FCS, LANTRA and SGA, are dynamic and practitioners are encouraged to debate and share ideas to help develop future editions. Revision will also be made in light of new research, changes to policy and new legislation.

Following Best Practice

Best Practice aims to provide guidance on relevant legislation and on how best to reinforce the three central aims of public safety, food safety and deer welfare (see overleaf). The guides seek to support, reassure and educate by setting out where possible general principles rather than tight prescription. In this way the Steering Group recognises that there is often more than one way of doing something and welcomes discussion of alternative approaches that add value to the way that the deer sector can enhance public safety, food safety and deer welfare.
In the development of the concept, the Steering Group recognised that there will always be situations, when for what ever reasons, things do not go according to plan. Following Best Practice is about understanding what the benchmark is for an activity, aiming to deliver at least to that level and aspiring to go further.

Acknowledgements

DCS and the Steering Group are extremely grateful to a wide range of professional and part-time deer managers, individual experts, students and organisations such as SSPCA and HSE who have given up their time to help ensure the quality of the guides.

Format of the Guides

In order to assist practitioners in following Best Practice, the guides have been designed to highlight legal requirements and issues relating to public safety, food safety and deer welfare. Links to other Best Practice guides have also been identified, as well as references to other relevant material.

Key to symbols

Background text

Back ground text without a symbol attached is generally used to describe the following:

• Advantages & disadvantages associated with the method
• Situations where the method is appropriate.
• Examples of what could happen and advice on how to minimise.
• Procedures which reduce costs, reduce effort, or save time, or represent the ideal option if not constrained by limited time or money. The costs of implementing these may outweigh the benefits.

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