By Jessica Frater, Mike Daniels, Jessica Tacey, Paul Johnson, Emily K. Madsen, Darragh Hare. 

Read the full paper here

Wild deer are iconic Scottish animals. However, their numbers are increasing due to a lack of natural predators such as lynx and wolves, land management decisions that favour high deer numbers, and limited public participation in deer hunting. High deer populations cause problems for biodiversity, ecology, people, and the economy, through browsing and trampling of natural habitats and crops, as well as compromising the welfare of deer themselves.

In response, the Scottish Government is considering legislation to increase the deer cull. This is likely to be controversial. As a result, deer management frequently features in Scottish media. Understanding how media coverage can make deer culling more or less acceptable to the Scottish public is valuable for anticipating the success of the proposal.

We used an online experiment to test whether members of the Scottish public viewed increasing the deer cull to be more or less acceptable depending on the type of messages they were shown in mock online news articles. Informed by theory and existing Scottish news coverage, we varied the reason given for increasing the cull and the image used to test if acceptability was sensitive to these.


We found that participants were generally accepting of increasing the deer cull. We also found that changing the messages people read did not influence their acceptability, apart from a small effect of changing the image: participants were slightly more likely to say increasing the cull was acceptable if they were shown an image of a healthy deer and setting compared to one of an unhealthy deer and setting. Our results were surprising because they challenge assumptions about how people perceive controversial issues and how messages may sway their perspectives.

Instead, the gender and social identities of participants (whether they were deer hunters or supporters of animal protection), as well as knowledge and experiences of deer and trust in the Scottish Government, were more important predictors of acceptability. Engaging with these aspects could help reduce social conflict as Scotland moves towards a more sustainable system of deer management which will involve higher levels of culling, a controversial issue in wildlife conservation.