INTRODUCTION

In recent years, concern for the damage caused by herbivores, or the absence of young trees in forests appears to have been growing. Many of these problems can be linked to changes in ungulate populations. Deer have been increasing intermittently in the temperate region for 100–200 years, and some problems with forest regeneration can be linked directly to these increases.

The fossil record shows that very large herbivores, related to those present in Africa and Asia today, were prevalent throughout the temperate region. Herbivores, including ancestral forms of the tapirs, horses and rhinos, and later many proboscidians (elephants and mammoths) and artiodactyls (cattle, deer, hippos and giraffe), have been present almost continuously since the Eocene, with browsing species particularly linked with forested environments (Yalden 1999, Agusti & Anton 2002). The last of the large herbivores disappeared only around 11 000 years ago. In the last few hundred years there have been further losses: the distribution of bison, Bison bonasus and B. bison, has shrunk dramatically in both Europe and North America, and Aurochsen, Bos primigenius (wild cattle), have gone extinct.

The disappearance of large wild herbivores from temperate regions at the end of the last ice age was followed sometime later by the arrival of domestic livestock. Grazing by early pasturalists in forests presumably dates from the time when livestock husbandry first spread from the Middle East to western Europe between 10 000 and 5000 years ago (Clutton‐Brock 1989).