Mammals and game management: A farmer's view.

Abstract

The UK's game animals, including several species of mammal such as deer and hares, have been hunted by people since pre-historic times. Their often substantial size means that they need large areas to accommodate them, so, with the exception, perhaps, of wintering grounds for waterfowl, they cannot be accommodated on nature reserves or protected through land designation measures such as Sites of Special Scientific Interest or Special Areas of Conservation. They are animals of the wider countryside, and as such, live, breed and forage over land used to grow crops, graze livestock or produce trees. Indeed, they do this in the crops, fields and woods of the Manydown Company Estate. In this chapter, we seek to explain how farmland mammals fit into the philosophy of game conservation management on the Manydown Company Estate, a commercial farm in southern England. The philosophy includes the need to control predators, and we illustrate this with a case study of the brown hare Lepus europaeus. The material and perspectives presented in this chapter reflect the views and personal experiences of one of the authors (HRO-B), a working farmer and owner of the Manydown Company Estate. These may not necessarily be representative of the British farming community as a whole, if indeed such a representation can exist at all. However, these views and experiences certainly reflect the philosophies that underpin working practices at Manydown, and we have some confidence that such philosophies operate over a very large acreage of farmland in Britain.