doghound said:
I noticed in the fallow listings that most of the gold medal bucks were park shot as well.
How can these be compared with a wild trophy, they could have been fed to get the trophies large and to a degree it must tame them. They really cannot be compared to the challenge of stalking a wild animal.
I appreciate someone has go to cull park deer and they deserve respect but its a bit sad to compare them with a wild deer trophy.
This a bit of an exaggeration doghound as only 4 out of 9 fallow gold medal qualifying heads listed (or 15 total medals) were park deer and it is not clear whether any CIC medals were actually awarded to them. Certainly feeding will help but the size of antlers is as much to do with genetics. This doesn't however detract from a good point.
It really begs the question as to what is a wild deer. If a record buck from Petworth escaped and was then shot by a stalker in a neighbouring wood, is that a wild buck and how could you tell given that Petworth DNA would be common in the local wild stock? If it isn't then how long does it have to be out, or how many generations have to pass before they are wild?
At the extreme end it could be argued that most fallow or red, and all sika, muntjac or CWD are not wild. More sensibly you might want to consider any head that had been grown in the wild for the purposes of medals but again, how would you know?.
Of course this only really matters when considering trophies and most people concerned with deer management regard trophies as far less important than culling the right animals. This doesn't mean that we should not be interested in trophies, they are a good guide to the health of a population, but they are the cream on the cake of deer management.
Enfieldspares is right to draw comparisons with some of the fishing records, carp, catfish, brown and rainbow trout have suffered from this with fish of record size being released (in some cases after importing them), caught and claimed. As a result for some species no further record claims are being considered, for others there is a strict definition of what a "wild" fish is.
It is still complicated because in some waters big fish that might be defined as "wild" live under the stock cages and grow bigger picking up the pellets that fall into the water.
My own view is that no boar or deer shot inside an enclosure should be eligible for CIC or SCI medals not so much because of enhanced size but because this is not "fair chase" which is the over-riding principle of stalking wild deer. The new record UK boar from Herefordshire was a truly free ranging boar that might have been living a wild life for over 10 years but the Galloway boar was not and no medal should be awarded.
I have no problem with anyone who wants to shoot deer in an enclosure, they have to be controlled and why should the estate not charge a stalker willing to pay to do this, I have no problem with recording exceptional park deer, but that's all that should happen.
For free ranging deer it gets a lot more complicated and I think might be a can of worms and perhaps best left alone.
The only good news is that roe deer are probably completely uncontroversial being effectively entirely free ranging.