Mistakes can be made and shouldn't be condoned or covered up, but they certainly aren't the norm, whereas the death of an animal in a ritual killing environment is always deliberately prolonged.
The point about deer watching "without fear" is a curious one to make. Deer seem not to be bothered in the slightest if one of their herd is shot dead. I remember seeing this demonstrated on TV a few years ago, it may have been in Scotland, where there were a load of deer grazing away, one of them gets shot dead, and his pals scarcely look up, and carry on munching as if nothing had ever happened.
As far as West Country deer are concerned, their only sources of cruelty at present are poachers, motorists and hard winters.
Hunting with hounds is a pretty effective way of managing and improving red deer herds, not the only way, but it pays for itself, and those herds have thrived under that management.
I'd guess that without hunting, the deer population would decrease fairly quickly and significantly, and in unpleasant ways. Stag hunting could to be replaced by another system of management involving stalking and accurate shooting, although the population would still tend to decline. I don't know what the situation is on the Quantocks, where they ceased hunting a few years back, whether the numbers have changed.
One thing that the hunts tend to do is to disperse the herds around the counryside so that they don't tend to congregate in the same areas all the time, and do damage in the same places. This means that a higher overall population can be tolerated - if they're driving farmers (or golf clubs!) to distraction in one locality, the hunt can move them along to another, so the "nuisance" is shared out more equally.
Ian, your comparison of hunters with Nazi concentration camp guards is indeed distasteful, but not only that, its relevance is not immediately apparent, especially since hunting in Nazi Germany was banned on the specific orders of Hitler.
