Deer stalking is a British term for the stealthy pursuit of deer for sporting purposes, historically with dogs such as Scottish Deerhounds, or in modern times typically with a high powered rifle fitted with a telescopic sight to hunt them.
While the expression "deer stalking" is widely used among British and Irish sportsmen to signify almost all forms of sporting deer shooting, the term is replaced in North American sporting usage by "deer hunting", a term that in Britain and Ireland has historically been reserved exclusively for the sporting pursuit of deer with scent hounds, with unarmed followers typically on horseback. The practice of hunting with hounds, other than using two hounds to flush deer to be shot by waiting marksmen, has been banned in the UK since 2005. Prior to that there were three packs of staghounds hunting wild red deer of both sexes on or around Exmoor, and until 1997, when they were disbanded, the New Forest Buckhounds hunting fallow deer bucks in the New Forest.
Famous quotes containing the words deer and/or stalking:
“A deer in the body of a woman, living resentfully in the Hollywood zoo.”
—Clare Boothe Luce (1903–1987)
“We talk about a representative government; but what a monster of a government is that where the noblest faculties of the mind, and the whole heart, are not represented! A semihuman tiger or ox, stalking over the earth, with its heart taken out and the top of its brain shot away. Heroes have fought well on their stumps when their legs were shot off, but I never heard of any good done by such a government as that.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)