If deer impacts are high, the combined impacts of stock and deer are likely to be greater than you want, although moderately high impact levels may be compatible with some management objectives, such as reducing the speed of open ground habitat loss due to tree colonisation.

Anecdotal evidence indicates that the presence of stock, and especially sheep, might deter deer from using an area. However, even though the pressure of deer on an area might decrease with the introduction of livestock, it will not disappear and their likely impact needs to be considered alongside that of the stock.

Whatever your woodland management objectives, where deer are present a plan for managing them will be needed.

Culling deer over a small area is rarely successful at reducing impacts unless the deer are also being culled in the surrounding areas. In fact, culling over a small area may have no effect at all on deer impacts. In some cases, therefore, a managed grazing project may only be successful if the woodland concerned is part of a larger area over which deer are being successfully controlled.

Options for protecting trees from deer, making trees less attractive to deer and reducing the significance of deer damage to trees are described in the document Protection of Trees from Mammal Damage (link to a PDF). Most of these approaches are equally applicable to other large herbivores.