I don’t even agree with the League Against Cruel Sports when it says that culling is necessary: I believe in select breeding, not select killing. We have sheep on our farm and we select breed – is we want a lot of sheep one year we put the ram to a lot of ewes. If we want less sheep we put it with fewer ewes. One can control what one breeds; if it IS necessary, one can dart and castrate deer when they’re young and let them go back into life, and my vet tells me that the hinds (or girls) could be given long-term contraceptive pills. This is the way to keep the numbers down. The stalking and killing of wild animals in their natural habitat, in remote areas, is particularly indefensible.

One the one hand hunters are saying that if they don’t kill them, deer will die out, on the other they say that deer cause damage and so must be killed. It’s contradictory, hypocritical and unproven. For 22 years I’ve been living with deer that haven’t been culled and we still have to mow the lawn and we still have a full yield of crops. In my opinion it’s pollution and destruction and greed that’s taking over our world – and not our wildlife, which seems to be diminishing in front of our eyes. Let them live! And then if they do start to take over, let’s re-think.

Now we hear that deer are starving. I wonder why! They’ve been fenced out of their natural habitat, the forestry, so where else can they go but stray onto arable land? And because farmers also don’t want to share any of their land with them, they fence them out too. How can they survive?

Farmers could let deer eat on their land and be financially compensated, as damage is usually minimal. The laws have to change – governments presently subsides very destructive farming and it’s about time they stopped and instead gave grants for encouraging organic farming, wildlife areas and hedgerows. We still have very old-fashioned thinking: giving grants for things that are destroying us. It’s pure greed, and we’re poisoning the planet at the same time.

We must strive for a better world. This Earth could be heaven and we have the ability to make it so. We should teach quality of life, friendship and self-containment to our children, and greed should be considered a bad rather than a good thing. People have to change if we want to save this world, and the only way for this world to change is for each individual to change.