Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent estimate she has made of the number of deer in the UK; and how many deer are culled each year.
Defra does not hold such information, nor has it made any recent estimates.
Published sources estimate that there are over one and a half million wild deer in the UK, of which 350,000 are culled each year by over 100,000 deer stalkers. The industry claims that around 2,500 jobs are provided by deer management. There are a further 32,000 deer on farms in the UK.