Conservation

A hill loch in Sutherland with Ben Stack and Foinaven behind

The Belief

The land comes first.

Sutlers & Co. started with a simple belief: wild food is better than farmed or flown-in food. Not sentimentally better, actually better. But that belief only holds up if the land producing it stays healthy. A hillside stripped by overgrazing, a river run dry, a native woodland that never gets the chance to regenerate: none of that produces the kind of food, or the kind of country, we built this business around. More on how that belief started in Our Story.

Caring about the land isn't separate from what we do here. It's the same belief, just followed all the way through.

Why It Matters

Not just sport, a working part of the system.

Responsible Management

Scotland has more deer than the land can carry, and too few natural predators left to manage that on their own. Responsible stalking, taking the right animals in the right numbers, is one of the few tools that actually works at scale. Left unmanaged, deer strip native woodland before it can regenerate, damage peatland, and push out other species sharing the same ground.

The Pledge

On top of that, we make a donation toward Highland native woodland restoration for every stag taken on The Highland Stalk. We don't have a formal partnership with a specific charity yet, so for now we choose where that goes ourselves, guided by the organisations below.

Doing The Actual Work

Organisations we admire and support.

We're not formally partnered with any of these yet. We're including them because their work is real, it's local to where we operate, and it's the closest match to what we believe in.

Trees for Life

Rewilding the Highlands by restoring the Caledonian Forest, the native woodland that once covered much of Scotland, through natural regeneration and direct planting. Their work is the closest match to where we want our own donations to go.

treesforlife.org.uk →

John Muir Trust

Owns and manages Quinag, the mountain range above Loch Assynt, not far from Scourie. Part of their work there is managing deer numbers down to levels the land can actually sustain, the same principle behind everything on this page.

johnmuirtrust.org →

British Deer Society

The UK's only charity dedicated entirely to wild deer: their welfare, their management, and the training that keeps stalking done properly. Good reading if you want to understand the thinking behind sustainable deer management before you come out with us.

bds.org.uk →