There is a lot of angst amongst the hunting community about a planned aerial cull of deer on the Dargo High Plains and Dinner Plain. The cull is scheduled to take place between Monday 21 September and Friday 25 September, subject to weather. 

As hunters there is generally a visceral opposition to measures such as aerial culling - we unashamedly like and even empathise with wild deer (a large part of the skill of hunting is to think like your quarry) and the thought of these animal being picked off from the sky, with no scrutiny, and then being left to rot in the bush, jars with so many of us on an emotional and ethical level. Add to this mix forty thousand outerwise active outdoorspeople who have been stuck at home for most of the year and these feelings and the response that they have invoked are understandably amplified.

At ADA we need to represent these values, but we also need to be objective. 

There are areas where wild deer have unsustainable negative impacts and where there needs to be control. There are areas where recreational hunting alone simply won’t do the job.

There is also another side to that coin. There are areas where the presence of deer is benign or even, in a broader context, beneficial. There are areas where recreational hunting has been extremely effective over a long period of time at keeping deer numbers at a sustainable level. It is not sustainable for policy makers to simply consider one element of deer management and ignore the others. 

The interests of recreational hunters need to be balanced with a broader interest – we do not argue that our interests should dominate in those decisions, but we need to make sure that they are not blindly dismissed either. We bring so much more to the table than a simple ability to apply pressure to a trigger.

We continuously hunt for common ground on deer management and for better understanding of both the role, and the complex interest of recreational deer hunters – too often we are misunderstood or dismissed in favour of a small group of vocal but misinformed ideologues. Those who oppose us should of course be afforded a seat at the table, but they must be required to bring their best ideas and to back them up with sound evidence, not simply get an armchair ride to trot out silly jingles as if they are a substitute for good policy. 

The Australian Deer Association has been involved in deer control operations with Parks Victoria for a number of years and will continue to do so where our volunteers can add value. We have refused to be involved in programs in areas which are open (or which have a realistic short term prospect of being open) to recreational hunters when no effort has been made to pursue control trials by simply engaging the broader deer hunting community and targeting their efforts to areas of concern. 

We get that 2020 is an exceptional year, but that actually is all the more reason why the rationale for control needs to be clear and well communicated – recreational hunters are the single largest stakeholder group in wild deer management by a factor of thousands, it is incumbent on Government agencies who seek to manage deer to engage genuinely and properly on these issues. 

We would love to be in a position to provide the hunting community with more information on this operation and we have actively sought answers. What we have been provided with to date are broad brush generalisations and meaningless motherhood statements. The accountability which is so critical to good public policy has vanished, first in the bushfire smoke and now in the fog of COVID-19. We will keep pushing – when we know more we will share it.

Parks Victoria have recently reported to us on ‘the success’ of the broader aerial control program which has been operating since early February which has removed just under 2,000 deer in a ‘target area’ of around 2,600km2 (or around 0.75 deer per km2). We requested more meaningful information from Parks Victoria so that we can report properly on the management and ecological implications of the aerial control program – to date all we have is a fairly meaningless metric of ‘minutes per animal’ (and even then, the mathematics don’t stack up).

By comparison, recreational deer hunters take around 150,000 wild deer a year in Victoria, mostly sambar, mostly on public land, mostly female. Sadly that won’t be the case this year and, with the added impact of bushfire that will have an impact on deer management for years to come.