"Each man kills the thing he loves" — Oscar Wilde

THE A4 target was 100m away, stapled to a wooden board, with a thick Devon hedgebank behind it. And behind the bank lay an empty field, a sharp cliff, and the Bristol Channel bashing the rocks on a sunny autumn afternoon.

As I held the high-powered bolt action hunting rifle and lined up the shot, Paul told me the recoil was kinder than a shotgun and the sound modifier on the barrel would take away most of the bang.

Still, when I looked through the sight and got ready to move the switch from safety to fire, I felt the sense of fear all men and women should experience when gripping a serious hunting weapon designed to instantly kill large wild beasts.

I took a deep breath, emptied my lungs and pulled the trigger. There was a slight recoil and the bang was like a large, well-filled, balloon bursting. I had never fired a rifle before and instinctively I twitched at the first round, but for the second and third shots it was easy to keep steady and hit the target. We strolled down the field to look at the bullet holes made by the .243 soft-nosed bullets, which had spun at 2,900ft a second: three clean "heart" shots. If the target had been a deer, it would have been dead every time, Paul said. Must be beginner's luck, I thought.

A few hours later, we arrived in Paul's well-worked Land Rover at the edge of a wood where deer often come out to feed at dusk.

The North Devon countryside was cooling and settling for the crepuscular shift. We were joined by Nick, a local deerstalker who earns a living as a builder; he was dressed in camouflage trousers and jacket and a balaclava helmet was pulled up on the top of his head. He rolled a cigarette and looked knowingly across his landscape, tobacco smoke mingling with the early evening mist.

Paul, a middle-aged ex-soldier who now works as a training manager assessor for the British Deer Society charity as well as a deerstalker and game dealer, put on a baseball cap and a camouflage jacket. He had already spent hours explaining to me about how the deer population had grown to unprecedented levels in this area within just five years.

It was also the rutting season, when red deer, which can be more than a metre tall to the shoulder, can become unpredictable and dangerous. We had just visited a farm where deer had allegedly eaten about four tonnes of corn, not to mention football fields worth of lush, green, grass, grown to feed dairy cows.

As Nick, Paul, and I crept slowly around the edge of the down-sloping field, next to a dense Devon hedgerow, down closer to the wood where the red deer were living with unpredictable wildness, I was thinking about the pyramid theory of killing Paul had explained earlier.

The pyramid theory of killing is based on the fact, Paul said, that local populations of deer will usually have at least one "top stag" at the peak of the population, and under him will be increasing numbers of weaker and younger stags, female deer, and newborns. Paul said the best way of keeping in check the rapidly expanding deer population was to "shave off" a side of the pyramid, taking a greater proportion of weaker animals, to maintain the health of the animals as a population. Paul, who said he loves wildlife and who spoke passionately about deer for hours, said hunters must never kill the best stags because that would weaken the quality of the population overall.

But days earlier, Paul said he had found out that two "top stags" had been slaughtered nearby. Their killings, he made clear, were not unlawful, but were a tragic loss of fine deer.

We were about half way down the remote field when Nick and Paul looked through their binoculars and spotted two red deer. I looked too. And there they were: a stag and a hind stepping out of the wood, as if dipping their toes in a hot bath, feeding on the thick knee-high grass. They were about 200 metres away. I remembered my shots on Paul's farm; he had said deer were usually shot from a distance of 50 and 100 metres.

Nick pulled a shining bullet out of his pocket and loaded his rifle. He looked again through his binoculars, but he couldn't get a clear sight, so we moved on, creeping along the hedgerow, getting nearer to the deer.

I then learned the golden rule of deerstalking: when the animals move, you move; when they stop, you stop. It was like the game "musical statues" children play; when the deer had their heads down feeding, we walked. And when they heard us snap a twig and looked up, we stood still, only our breathing audible.

When we were within about 50 metres of the edge of the wood, Nick and Paul decided we should go into a hedge and wait. It was easy enough getting over the barbed wire and then onto the hedgebank, in a hollow under trees, with a clear sight of the wood.

The light was going fast and the deer had disappeared.

But then there was a noise. An animal trotted out of the hedge, almost behind us. It was a female roe: delicate, curious, charming. We sat and watched her pottering about. The hedge was by this time thrumming with head-biting midges and soon enough, as the light quickly faded and the air cooled, bats began circling overhead.

Nick was not interested in shooting the roe. The red deer had gone, but every now and then Nick would raise his rifle and look for them. This was "his field"; he had permission from the landowner to shoot deer there. And he was also a living connection to an ancient tradition of the English countryside.

In his benchmark book The History of the Countryside, Oliver Rackham explained that red and roe deer were among the most important animals in our prehistoric economy. He wrote: "They were almost ubiquitous in woodland, moorland, and even tundra. They provided meat, skins, and antlers and bones used as tools."

In fact, he wrote, deer only declined because of encroaching farmland and by the middle ages deer were rare. The animals were then semi-domesticated in aristocratic parks and "Royal forests". And when those systems went out of favour, red deer for decades were only found in the wild in a few remote northern areas and on Exmoor. They have only started to breed prolifically and expand their territories at pace in the past few decades.

Fallow deer, meanwhile, were introduced by the Normans at the same time as rabbits, perhaps in the 12th century. Again, they were semi-domesticated, but escaped and have bred well in the wild in places like Devon.

There are many theories about why the deer population has soared in England, including in North Devon, in recent years. Oliver Rackham believed it was because fewer people worked the land, particularly people with firearms, so deer could more easily avoid human contact to breed. In addition, Paul said recently-released alien breeds, such as the small-bodied Muntjac, were spreading at a particularly fast rate. He believes the countryside "lock down" ordered during the foot and mouth outbreak in 2001 and 2002 allowed deer a window to flourish almost unhindered. He also said that Muntjac were aggressive little beasts which made delicious ideal-sized cuts for the oven.

Soon it was night and there was no realistic chance that Nick could see, let alone shoot and kill, a deer, so we climbed out of the hedge and tramped back up the hill, the long grass heavy with dew. The next day, those red deer could have been anywhere within a range of many miles.

Anticipating readers' responses, I must mention that some people think that shooting deer is a repulsive and immoral act. I do not want to offer my opinion on the ethics of killing deer or eating venison, but I am aware that someone who eats meat or fish of any type is in danger of being a hypocrite, or at least a muddled thinker, if they speak out against killing deer. Vegetarians at least have a consistent logic to their objections.

Paul's take on the ethics was this: "If we did not manage the deer population, the environment would be incapable of sustaining them. If you fail to cull them, they fill up the tranquil environments to capacity and eat themselves out of their homes; there's not sufficient food to maintain their health, so diseases set in." He said he had found evidence of TB in deer in North Devon.

Meanwhile, the ethical argument against killing deer does not appear to be supported by the population measures alone. It is hard to know exactly how many deer have been culled in North Devon in recent years because no official records are kept, but an informal count by farmers in the Hartland area in 2008 recorded 180 killed deer; deer are still increasingly common, so their numbers could be in the thousands, Paul said.

The law is also very clear about deerhunting: you can only kill deer in season (which varies between species and sexes), during the day, with the landowner's permission, with the relevant firearms certificate, and using a specific type of rifle. Paul said some deerstalkers were still not as well trained as they should be and he gets angry when deer are shot badly, or if the "wrong deer", such as top stags, are killed just for trophies. "I think there has to be a change in the law," he said.

Despite our heavily-urbanised country, the deer in North Devon are still finding the wild places to move and breed, while human beings long ago made extinct the bears, wolves and wild pigs which would have been their natural predators.

In his book Meat, the celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall claimed that truly wild animals dispatched efficiently by a good shot provided meat which was the "least ethically problematic of all". There is also no suggestion that any deer species in the UK is endangered.

Deer are also known to cause significant damage to woodland and farmers say they can, in a herd, damage and eat large amounts of crops. Paul said 50% of farmers despised deer while the rest tolerated or liked them. I met dairy farmer Norman Shere who said the deer population had increased massively on his 200 acres near Hartland in the past decade; deer were now munching tonnes of corn and pasture land, not to mention damaging hedgerows.

Trained hunters like Paul and Nick kill deer instantly with a well-aimed bullet, which leads to the crucial question: Has a deer which has lived wild and who dies without any foreknowledge of its death had worse or better treatment than a pig reared in a shed and shunted off to an abbatoir? Do you eat sausages?

As I sat in the field watching the deer up close for the first time, it was clear why people have strong feelings about them, even if some of that concern is because of Bambi-ish sentimentality. The British Deer Society, for its part, is clear that human beings are responsible for the management of a hugely-expanding deer population in North Devon.

Whether or not you condone the killing and eating of deer, it is hard to ignore the grace and charm of one of our few great wild beasts, particularly now that the bears, wolves and wild pigs are long gone. As Oliver Rackham said, few of us can resist the wonder and adventure of seeing them.

Watch Adam Wilshaw's video of his deerstalking experience: