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Scotland’s deer crisis: who pays the bill for the Highlands’ most expensive hobby?

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 Opinion • Land Reform • Ecology A million deer roam Scotland, kept in numbers by a culture of sporting estates and trophy hunting. The public pays £135m a decade for the privilege. It doesn’t have to be this way. There is a peculiar kind of cognitive dissonance required to look at the Scottish Highlands and call them wild. The bare, treeless hills are romantic to the tourist’s eye but catastrophic to the ecologist’s. They are not a natural landscape. They are the product of centuries of land management in the interests of a very small number of people, sustained to this day at extraordinary cost to everyone else.   New figures,  revealed by The Ferret , crystallise the scale of this dysfunction. Scotland’s publicly funded forestry bodies have spent more than £134m controlling deer over the last decade. Forestry and Land Scotland alone spent £77.6m between 2014 and 2025, a sum that has nearly doubled from £5.3m to £10.4m in a single decade. A further £56.4m was ...
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Starmer's Big Lie: Every "Investment" Announcement Is Britain Being Sold to the Epstein Class

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The Investment Lie: How Britain Is Selling Its Future to Pay Its Rent & That Includes Our Wildlife Every few months, the prime minister or minister steps up to a podium and announces, with great fanfare, that billions of pounds of “investment” are flowing into Britain. Into communities. Into nature. Into housing. Into our future. The numbers are always impressive. The press releases are always confident. The backdrops are always carefully chosen: a construction site, a wind farm, a rewilded hillside, a smiling family outside a new home. And it is, almost entirely, a lie.   Not a lie in the technical sense that the money does not exist, or that nothing will be built. Something will indeed be built. Some trees will be planted. Some houses will go up. Some wetlands will be restored. The lie is in the word “investment” itself, and in the silence about who ends up owning what, and on what terms the rest of us get to use it. What Investment Actually Means Investment, in the hones...
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The Big Bad Wolf is Coming to Save Our Children

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How Reintroducing the Wolf will save our Children Of all the animals that have ever shared these islands with us, none has occupied the human imagination quite so persistently, nor so darkly, as the wolf. It’s howl runs through our oldest stories. Its shadow falls across folklore from the Cairngorms to the Carpathians. In the common telling, the wolf is a creature of danger, of teeth and darkness, of children snatched from paths through the forest. It is the animal that, of all animals, we feel in our bones to be a mortal threat. It is, then, a matter of some scientific consequence that this feeling is almost entirely without foundation. The purpose of this essay is not merely to correct a popular misapprehension, though that is a necessary beginning. It is to pursue a more unsettling argument: that the wolf, absent from Britain for nearly three centuries, is not simply harmless to human life, but is, on the available evidence, capable of actively protecting it. The mechanism by which ...
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