Abstract
In New Zealand red deer have been introduced into different spaces and places that reflect changing social, economic, and political needs. Initially introduced into New Zealand in the latter part of the 19th century to provide recreational hunting opportunities, 'deerstalkers' have since continued to interact with red deer through the practises of hunting to create complex nature-society relations. By the 1930s the red deer population had increased to such an extent that they were hunted in an attempt to control their impact on the environment. In the post-World War Two years, they became a valuable 'natural' resource and were directly subsumed into economic processes by the commercial hunting and recovery industry. Wild red deer were firstly used as an extractive resource, 'harvested' from the bush for their meat, before being domesticated and transformed through breeding programmes in an effort to gain 'improvements'. Within the game estate sector of the tourism hunting industry red deer stags are now bred on farms for desirable trophy characteristics - primarily antler size - to be hunted by tourism hunters within high fenced enclosures. This thesis traces the development of different hunting based relations between red deer and people through an analysis of historical documents, participant observation in hunting practices and a series of interviews with people involved in recreational hunting and the tourism hunting industry. It shows how human-animal relationships and interactions have evolved within hunting, forming new hunting based identities, new spaces of hunting, and ultimately new physical forms of red deer as hybrid 'trophy animals'.