Big Game Canned Hunting Comes to the UK

The UK has always had canned hunts in the form of heavily stocked bird shoots, but now some places are stocking large foreign mammals to be shot for a price. The Guardian reports:

[A]nyone looking to bag an animal’s head to grace that empty spot on their wall needs only to head to deepest, darkest Bedfordshire where they can shoot rare deer, or, for the financially stretched, wallabies and sheep.

A small number of overseas firms are offering trophy-shooting packages in the county, which boasts several impressive deer parks. A ‘grade A’ red deer stag, highly prized by hunters because of its magnificent antlers, can be shot for a £9,000 trophy fee, according to an online price list dated 2018 and distributed by a Danish travel company called Limpopo & Diana Hunting Tours.

The company has been offering clients a range of shooting packages in Bedfordshire, including some at Woburn Abbey Deer Park, one of the largest conservation parks in Europe, which boasts that its 3,000 acres “are sanctuary to more than 1,200 individuals from nine species … including the critically endangered Père David’s deer, which was saved from extinction in its homeland thanks to a reintroduction from Woburn in 1985”.

What's odd (but not illegal or immoral) is that Woburn Abbey Deer Park is supposedly “not affiliated” with the shooting travel company offering the canned hunt package. Woburn Abbey Deer Park did not address specific questions asked by the Observer newspaper, but said in a statement that: “One of the most important management aspects of the Deer Park is the annual cull. The cull is overseen by trained professionals to ensure a healthy and sustainable population of deer within the park. The cull is based on continued census counts and aims to improve age dynamics and diversity maintaining the population density at a level suitable to ensure the continued health and welfare of all the deer within the park. The culled animals are then sold as venison to local and national markets where it enters the food chain as a healthy and sustainable food product.”

Woburn Abbey Deer Park is owned by Bedford Estates which is controlled by the Duke of Bedford, and it specifically breeds red deer to create “spectacular” antlers, with the semen from the best deer sold to other deer farms and canned hunt establishments around the world.

If £7,000 to bag a deer feels a bit steep, Limpopo & Diana Hunting Tours offers a different shooting package for a different deer park in Bedfordshire where you can shoot wallaby for £220, or a Soay ram sheep for £600 or a ewe for £150.