Stag Hunting and Tourism - survey

63% of tourists would not visit Exmoor or the Quantocks because of the presence of stag hunting.

The purpose of our two surveys called “Tourism and Stag Hunting” was to find out if stag hunting, (or the knowledge that stag hunting was happening on Exmoor and the Quantocks), would put potential tourists off from visiting the areas. We wanted the survey to be shared as widely as possible in order to reflect the real views of everyday people. The surveys ran in June and July 2023. In total, there were 912 responses.

The full results are below.

HOWEVER, unfortunately, some pro hunters cheated, and instead of filling in the form once and genuinely, they filled it in repeatedly and falsely. Of course, we acknowledge that stag hunters from all over the country do visit the area in order to see a stag (or hind) chased to exhaustion and then killed. But we also know that the majority of people object to the cruelty of it and would be horrified to see it. The hunts’ main excuse for stag hunting is “research and observation”. We observed that not one single response from pro hunters said anything about the  benefits or results of all this research and observation. You can read their excuses for cruelly hunting stags in the FULL RESULTS below.

Despite this, the total figures (from the combined surveys) show that 63% of tourists would not visit Exmoor or the Quantocks because of the presence of stag hunting.

One of our aims in AAS is to make sure that ALL tourists know about stag hunting. Then, they can decide for themselves whether to visit or not.