Trophy Hunting in the UK 

By golly, you are immensely talented in making these mini documentaries.

This video made me very emotional. It is something I feel very strongly about. I will share this on every social media platform that I can. Thanks Jonny for another great show 👌

14:02 "I think the thing people don't like is the fact that you enjoy it". This, absolutely this. Citiots think wildlife management is all to do with satiating some crazed blood lust and yet will quite happily buy their meat from the supermarket without blinking an eye. The phrase "If it pays, it stays" is prevalent in Africa where habitats are preserved through paid hunting which would otherwise be turned over to farming

Having watched many TGS videos, this is your finest. The production quality is utterly superb, beautifully edited with stunning shots of the landscape that these wonderful animals inhabit. The argument was given maturely, intelligently and sensitively. An immensely moving, educational and passionate documentary. This is, by far, the best shooting channel I have seen and if I were to recommend just one video to a non-shooter - this would be it.

Let’s not get it twisted, unless you’re well connected or very wealthy, hunting in the UK is pretty much unattainable. The fact that it’s an upper class thing is what folks are probably most upset about

Stunning production value. I expect Sasha to be working in Hollywood one day. Hopefully on the Jonny Carter movie

Beautifully written, filmed, produced, edited and narrated. Wonderful job guys.

Stunning shots of the deer. The quality of your short films are getting better and better.

A really good video, which highlights the many arguments for the killing of deer, and why paying for the privilege actually promotes the animal husbandry. By putting a price on the their heads, you give them value, and that value goes to manage their welfare and ultimately continues their existence. Like the Grouse, (and many other spices), without the cost to cull, there would be no management, and without the management there would be no Grouse et al.

Couldn't help but laugh about the "first time stalking together in 9 years since our son was born" 😂 ah parenthood: "where the f*** did that decade go?!?"

Some time and money has been spent on this... tremendous. The filmography is exceptional, the characters within are able to get their side across well and fairly. Both a pleasure to watch and educational. Well done.

Outstanding documentary! Beautiful images, well spoken comments and a good message. I can't believe I can watch this in RU-vid and it doesn't have millions of views. Great job by everyone involved! 👍

Well done, and well said. I find it ironic that Natural England wants to cull the Red deer even more, in order to grow grasses? As an American I; A. Find the Gamekeepers job fascinating and B. every time Jonnie does a documentary on the gamekeepers or culling animals, I have to remind myself that y'all are on an island and don't have the luxury of letting wildlife "go wild" per say. Thank you again.

The videography is nothing short of exquisite, you guys keep it up, your doing amazing! Love all your videos! This channel has inspired me to take up the sport, just need that few quid to get started 🤣

Excellent bit of film work guys. Everything said in this video is factual. There are idiots who blast away at any animal they see but they are the minority. Most football supporters want to watch their game but there's a small number who want to throw petrol bombs and have a fight. Unfortunately, I don't think you'll ever make people see the truth and reality of the situation. It always comes back to people being rich. Well you can take your kids to Benidorm for a week for £1000 or have a couple of days in the Highlands. I know what I'd sooner do and it has nothing to do with being wealthy.

Well done Jonnie, the right message brilliantly delivered!

Nice job on the documentary 👍 im very compassionate about this. I've been hunting since I was old enough, and my dad showed me the ropes when I was only 5 years old. Some of my family/friends don't understand or think their is a need to hunt nowadays, I tell them exactly what you are saying. This is good information I think people should know even if they don't hunt. Much love from USA.

I dont agree with killing animals without good reason, however the hunting fraternity also contribute the most to conservation. Tricky one Edit: after watching this it's nice to see how much respect and value is given to this , and that these positove aspects are not communicated well enough!

Thank You. As someone that grew up with hunting but didn’t start myself until recently I must say that I love the way you try to visualize what hunting and the countryside is. It breaks my heart that many people are so far removed from country life and the reality outside the big cities.

As per usual gents, excellent production. Keep up the amazing work! Sending our best from South Africa.

Excellent piece of work. Just the sort of material that we all need to be able to explain our world and balance the argument.

Great production. Love the camera work. This education is sorely needed in the age of over the top social justice activism.

Stunning production quality, both in the narrative and cinematography, you should both be proud of your work and the rest of us interested parties all the better for watching your output👏👌🏻👍

This is very insightful look into how different cultures/countries view hunting. In the States,where I live, whitetail deer are plentiful thanks to 100 years of management and conservation. In fact, I live 10 minutes from downtown Atlanta and I see deer at least once a week in my yard (my favorite is the doe that has dropped twin fawns behind my house for the last 5 years). Most people don’t see them as pests, if the sight of a buck in the early morning fog doesn’t make your heart race then you’re dead, despite having their flower beds browsed to the ground, but it does seem to make reasonable people open to the idea of hunting as a form of population control. People are also worried about “factory meat” and are interested healthier, more “natural”, meat so I’ve found that as long as I tell people how delicious the animal was they don’t seem to care if I happened to keep the antlers as a memento.

Wonderful work again from TGS and the NGO. 👍👍

Excellent job as always guys. Great representation of our community.

A beautifully shot, extremely informative and educational video. Well done Jonny and NGO.

This is awesome! Exactly what the community needs to convey how we feel and why it is not just a passion but a necessity.

Growing up in rural Virginia I know a lot if families who hunt deer to feed the family throughout the year. For the cost of a cheap rifle and a box of ammunition a family in poverty can afford to eat throughout the year. And if they want to hang that deer on their wall then so be it.

Thanks, Jonny for the intriguing video. Although we have wonderful hunting here in Wyoming, my dream is a red stag hunt in Wales and Scotland. Cheers.

This is beautifully shot. What a video and also taught me something!

Very well made documentary.

Very good content! Keep it up guys!

Awesome Jonny, another masterpiece !! Very informative, stunning camera work again too.

Most of the "trophy" game reserves in South Africa used to be farm land. Owners found that they can make more money by converting to paid hunting. There are game breeders that sell stock to these estates. It is a business that brings money to the host country. Not my thing ( I do hunt but not for trophies) but I see no problem. In America, the deer population in the North East is booming. The problem is too many deer and they are suffering from disease and lack of food which has brought them into the suburbs. Everywhere they get over restrictive on hunting, there is a problem.

An extremely important message! Managed hunting is wildlife conservation. In fact, it is far better than any other method for conserving wildlife - not only the hunted animal but also the entire ecosystem.

Great documentary, pity main stream tv doesn't pick this type of film up. Would give people an insight into this aspect of deer management and country life.

As a Brit and from my own experience I would say that deer stalking in the UK is absolutely for the rich/wealthy ..... as soon as you take away "free" hunting on public land you prevent the vast majority of the population from hunting. In the UK you can only hunt on private land .... if you want to hunt on this private land you have to pay obscene amounts of money (as the prices are usually aimed at the American hunting market) To avoid this ridiculous requirement to be wealthy to hunt i have moved to NZ where I can hunt for free on public land without any issues. However this video is excellent and is well edited but does nothing to stop the perception and stereotypes of wealthy people hunting in the UK

Brilliant bloody well done you should be very proud of this documentry

Awesome Film but as Hunters and shooters we all know this, this needs to be put on main, stream TV, In the US, A list Celebs are in their own Hunting films on mainstream chanels , could you imagine if Our Celebs Guy Ritchie, Becks, Lord Botham were shown Killing on mainstream Tv,.,

Very well done, as a hunter from the US just outstanding.

Well done.Exspecially the history of deer management.Greets from Germany. Waidmannsheil.

Well said about what wildlife management means to the future. Every Deer I harvest on my property is a Trophy to me.

Very good video. Makes me think how blessed I am to live and hunt in Canada. Wider range and much more inexpensive compared to Europe. Definitely still an “Everymans” sport here. Sure hope it stays that way...

Great video 👍👍👍

A very good mini docu. Please make more

Nice work again Jonny.

Brilliant as always TGS team.

Excellent video, keep it up 👍👍👍

Everyone wants to do it but so few can because of no public land & bureaucracy.

I had no Idea tractors were invented in the 1950s!!!! Great educational value!!!

good job john and the team

fantastic mate. some really good points ill be taking forward.

Outstanding, thankyou.

Well done. I wish I could give it two thumbs up.

Lovely editing mate

Very nicely done Johnny ✔

Wow. Awesome film, and thought provoking.

Tourists bored quality video well done boys I tip my hat to the camera work 👍👍👍

To be honest I just want a dear head, I have a alligator head, but it’s kinda small and doesn’t really seem good in the wall

what an amazing production this is.

Really good video every one explained it well country side needs to be managed by the people who live there call it country side management and all pc ant's will be ok

The other problem is the people who have too much money and no idea. They cannot shoot accurately because they don't practice enough, they don't re-load ammunition to suit the rifle, they don't clean the rifle correctly and they don't / wont head or neck shoot because they are not good enough or they follow the ' best practice' narrative. I understand estates bringing in people to pay a premium to shoot but the downside is this inability to do the job. This is what gives the whole 'stalking' subject a bad name. I have seen it happen on an estate I manage. I advised against selling an animal as a trophy stag but was overruled. After what happened I was told I was correct and we would never have anyone shooting, paying for the privilege to do so. Your quite correct with the statement that the true people who manage deer care very deeply about them and get very upset when people with all the gear and no idea turn up and do a substandard job. Hence the reason I still manage the same estate I have been since 2007.

Good information

Keep up the Good Work

Excellent documentary.

Bloody Brilliant thx

Fantastic job!

no better way to present it . thanks for video, awesome

great video

Wonderful!

Deer hunting is difficult to understand if you have never needed to hunt to eat. I personally don’t shoot bucks . I stopped about 10 years ago, just my preference. There are way more doe . I don’t know anyone who thinks like I do but it’s my choice. Bucks get a pass i if they cross my path. I never considered any deer a trophy, just food.

pretty sure both male and female deer have antlers it depends on the time of season as to which has what.

I would love to hunt in the highlands of Scottland

Fantastic informative mini documentary, I'm new to the sport and didn't quite understand the need for animal control, after going out with my friend who is a game keeper and shown how it all works for the animal welfare.

It's not trophy hunting. It's conservation hunting. Wildlife needs to be conserved by management.

14:00-14:52 EXACTLY!! ...and also far batter than not managing the herd at all.

This is such an excellent documentary, but still won't get through to many. Some just want to ignore important context to maintain an 'all killing of life is wrong' and 'right to life' set of principles. What really gets to me however is that all too often these same people are also aligned to believe that an unborn child has no right to life. Complete hypocrites.

14:53+ ...the vast vast vast majority of the time, privately funded endeavors that work to the benefit of people who are freely exchanging fee-for-service is much more effective than anything managed and run by government entities. Absolutely true for wildlife/ecosystem conservation.

A guy with a hunting cabin is not my understanding of what a “trophy hunter” is!!! I guess maybe I was educated wrong but paying joe farmer a few bucks to shoot a deer isn’t what people use to describe trophy hunting that I’ve ever heard.

He says its not a trophy room then goes on to explain its a trophy room.

I find it strange that people against hunting would like to kill hunters .

With out people who love the country side and know how to look after it where would all jobs go do thay want more people out of ( work)

Yeah.... Ummm I'm American, I hunt for food. Took a doe Sunday morning, with my Winchester 1895. It's food, not for trophy. People can make all the clams they want about trophy hunting being good for animals, it isn't. A lot of people in America. Don't assume hunters are bad people, many of them are grandchildren or children or siblings of hunters. There are some people who do assume they are, but a lot don't. Trophy hunting is abhorrent. There's a lot of data that says that it actually produces smaller animals, gentrifies hunting, with the fiscal benefits for wildlife conservation often not ongoing where it's supposed to, and makes bad hunters (like you mostly have in western Europe, they are running jokes for Alaskan guides)

Amazing 🤤

The trophy for me is videoing the difficult shot by myself then getting armchair experts around the world to give me their opinion. Not how big the antlers were.

Dave Carrie is the real deal!

What an excellent film. I can see how much effort and skill went into making it. As to the content, it's spot on. In the light of recent discussions related to TH it's quite frankly frustrating, but all we can do is to educate those in the middle or those with genuinely open minds. Once again, a job well done! 👏🏼

Trophies are usually the piece of the animal that doesn't end up being used. Imagine tribes killing deer and using everything but not the antlers because they're not as useful. Now that tribe can show off how big of a deer they killed because that would show that they had more deer than others. Trophies are a celebration of the size of the animal, not a celebration of a "murderous instinct".

I don't really think of there even being trophy hunting in the UK. It's basically just deer hunting. When I think of trophy hunting I do think of Elephant, Lion, etc.

Thank you.

Wait, did HE CALL POLES GERMANIC?!?

I just like to hear the thunk of a bullet striking flesh.

Great documentary! I live hunting and am convinced most people who don’t like it have never tried it or just don’t understand it. For some reason people don’t get animal control. And about the animal antlers reminding you of that hunt I have a room in my house full of all my mule deer. And the centerpiece is a small 3x2. Because that was my first buck and I hunted him for 3 years

Very well done. As a hunter in the U.S., I very much appreciate you and what you are doing. Keep up the good work and stay safe!

I want to play devil's advocate as I am truely interested in the answer. Isn't there a problem when the majority of hunters are trophy hunters? By this I mean if the majority of hunters are looking to take a trophy stag then you will wind up with a surplus of does which can be detrimental to the quality of the herd. My understanding, which I well admit may be wrong, is that controlling herd numbers and quality is best done by regulating the quality of the does, not the stags.

The truth is "they" resent the residual freedom of the countryside. In addition deer represent a reason to own a firearm; and a certain group of city dwellers think the would would be a better place without firearms. As someone that remembers taking a shotgun and hunting kit to school so we could leave straight after the last bell to get to the marshes and stake our claim to a duck blind I understand that the presence of firearms is not the cause of social problems.

It is amazing that many people do still seem ignorant to the fact that the UK (especially English) countryside is not really wild or particularly natural it is the way it is, the way we all know and love because of millennia of human activity. To keep what we have it needs to be managed and that needs to be funded, hunting is as important, if not more in some ways, to that as the money generated by any tourist location or country park. The only way to win people round is to show the great British public that hunting is as much about passion and appreciation for wildlife as it is for someone taking photos at a beauty spot or hiking. Fishermen, hunters etc are very much in the minority here and we need to take the rest of the public with us and not simply say that "..they (non hunters/fishers) do not understand the countryside" or assume that they are not willing to listen and learn from well thought out and logical arguments. Sadly what we get are Idiotic criminals who go and burn out a car outside Chris Packhams house!? all that does is entrench support for his standpoint and raise support and sympathy from the wider public. Imagine the good press and support from the public if someone like BASC had left a nice big hamper of game pies, cider, trout fillets and vegan cous cous.. etc at his gates and then called the media...

As an overseas Hunter I am glad to see that you made this documatarie film to let people see how you can do deer or wildlife management with low costs by letting other people cull your animals. I'm convinced that this is a far better methode than leave wildlife management over to the Government because that wil be much more expensive for the tax payer and you create that less and less people are interested in the Coutryside and spent there money there. All animals must be managed if we like it ore not so who can have a problem with people who do this that bring money in to the local economy and money that can be put back into management of the countriside in general.

I bet some of those people frowning on trophy hunting have some nice trophy boots belts or wallets 🤔