Issue 111 - February March |
On Sale Monday 9th February

This season's weather has continued in the same unpredictable vein, with ridiculous extremes of both temperature and rainfall

We're finally off on a big alpine mission in the Hooker Landsborough wilderness area, but fingers cross the big blob of moisture on the weather map sitting out in the Tasman Sea doesn’t decide to drop down and park up off the South Island's West Coast while we're in there!

Over the Christmas period the daily onslaught of Forest and Bird and Federated Farmers media campaign against deer has continued unabated. In the biased media every day we’ve seen yet another article or opinion piece claiming herds of deer are overrunning the country everywhere and the government must do something about it. This is simply not true. And the media has not once verified the facts nor gone to the game animal sector to get some balance to their propaganda. As we said last issue, yes, there are areas where numbers are too high especially around private land or council land locked up from hunting. But there are large areas of public land where numbers are very low due to continual aerial 1080 drops, and areas with good access where hunters both recreational and commercial are controlling numbers.

Another of Forest and Birds claims is that recreational hunters are not doing their job and can't be trusted. That is also completely untrue. Recreational hunters have never been empowered or given the job of managing deer. Under the legislation that responsibility has always sat squarely with government departments and these government departments have only ever tried to manage deer for their harmful effects, never for their resource value.

It's the same old ideological, black and white, all deer are bad argument. Forest and Bird only ever quote in their campaigns the areas where deer have been too high in numbers for too long, and have done considerable ecological damage - and claim it’s the same everywhere. No one wants deer numbers that high – skinny deer and stuffed bush is no good to anyone. On our extensive travels through our mountain lands throughout the country we see plenty of areas with very low numbers of very healthy deer in very healthy bush. On the upcoming TV Show you’ll see an episode where we only saw one deer for the whole of a 6 day trip – but what a deer that was! That is the whole point - what we need is a low population of the right animals that people value, in the right places. Currently because no value is being put on keeping the right animals by the government departments in control of our public lands, we tend to end up with high numbers of skinny breeding hinds that nobody wants, and very low numbers if any, of fat hinds and quality stags for both meat and trophy hunters.

Forest and Bird and the rabid ideologues also claim HOSIs are going to be a disaster, and that recreational hunters just want more deer/tahr everywhere. It shows how little they have actually looked at or understand the HOSI proposals. Or that they are deliberately misrepresenting them to try and stir up a green lynch mob against them. HOSIs are very much part of the solution for our cash strapped Public Conservation Land. They won’t work everywhere, but have been proven to work where the animals are valued - and at low numbers. Hunters are prepared to put their hands in their pockets and pay for the opportunity to have a block with low numbers of quality males in it to themselves over the bugle/roar – just look at the success of the Wapiti program.

If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you always got. And this could never be truer than New Zealand's history with deer. It is time for a paradigm mind shift in how we manage deer. Our current legislation managing Valued Introduced Species like deer as pests only has not worked, and we need to manage them not only for their harmful effects but also for their social, historic and monetary value to a significant number of New Zealanders.