On Thursday September 17, regional Victorian’s emerged from a significant and absolutely unprecedented lockdown.

For many deer hunters with an ‘outdoors itch’ the thought of stalking the Dargo high plains in early spring is about as tantalising a prospect as you could imagine in the best of times.

Given how 2020 has unfolded, those feelings were naturally amplified. In the age of social media, hunters still subject to lockdowns in the Melbourne Metropolitan area (and others across Australia who dream of the Victorian High Country) watched on, perhaps with an understandable dose of jealousy, but also with an eagerness to live vicariously through their regional brothers and sisters.

In the mountain town of Dargo, off limits for so much of the past year first through bushfire and subsequently from COVID, local business owners breathed a sigh of relief that the hunters, a user group which contributes significantly to the local economy, would be back in town (albeit in a limited way).

News of an aerial cull on the Dargo High Plains, heralded by a vague email to stakeholders with a fraction more detail subsequently put out through local signage and shared on social media, has dampened the relief and excitement and turned it into a level of angst, bemusement and even anger.

Hunters have stayed away, put off by the vague information and the prospect of a wasted effort. Businesses in Dargo in particular have reported custom far lower than they anticipated over recent days.

Separate from arguments about the merit of these culls from a management perspective (and we will get to that) is the observation that the communications about these operations from the land managers have been a failure.

This is not a problem which is new, or which has not been brought to the attention of the agencies previously.

We were involved in a meeting back in November 2018 where the disconnect between land managers and the hunting community in particular was acknowledged and where a commitment to improve communications was made. As the past week has evidenced that commitment has not been met.

With over 40,000 licenced participants, deer hunters make up the largest below snow line user group in the Alpine National Park for eight months of the year.

Deer hunters are not blind to the negative impacts that wild deer can have – in fact, despite rhetoric from the green lobby groups it was deer hunters who pushed for seasonal and species restraints to be removed in the early 2000’s.

It was deer hunters who worked with the previous Victorian Government to remove constraints on controlling deer on private land and deer hunters who pushed for the Sustainable Hunting Action Plan to include a deer management strategy for Victoria.

We don’t oppose deer control - we simply ask that it is based on evidence, that there is “warts and all” reporting on its effectiveness and that we are properly consulted on something which is of great interest to us.
Given how many hunters there are and the role that we play that is not too much to ask.
There has been a program of aerial culling in fire affected areas of Victoria for months now - there is absolutely an opportunity for a well targeted program to avoid deer becoming a problem in highly sensitive areas. The scant reporting to date gives us no confidence that this has happened.
Now we see aerial culling of sambar deer in areas which are usually open to recreational hunting being scheduled for the very week that regional Victorians can finally get out of lockdown and go up the bush.

The timing is coincidental and unfortunate - the lack of clear communication and proper consultation is something else altogether.
For the residents and small businesses of towns like Dargo this is a bitter pill - coming after nearly twelve months of lost tourism with bushfires and then COVID.
As we said earlier, the communications about the aerial cull have been far too vague for anyone to have confidence that such as poorly timed slap in the face is well justified.
We have asked a lot of questions about the current aerial culling and have so far not received anything approaching a satisfactory answer - if we had a magic wand to wave here, we would - but we don’t. What we are doing is working with politicians and public servants to force some proper accountability on these programs.

It’s imperative that the Victorian Government provides public answers to the sorts of questions which should underpin expensive and jarring shoot-to-waste control programs - to date we have only been given meaningless measures like total deer shot or minutes per deer - none of that tells us anything about the effectiveness of these programs from a management perspective. It’s called accountability – it’s a critical element of public confidence when public money, public resources and public land are involved.

The key questions are:

- What is the actual cost per day of these aerial control programs (including administration, travel and accommodation)?
- What particular impact or impacts is the Government seeking to address on the Dargo High Plains and Dinner Plain and what pre and post control monitoring is in place so that we can measure success?
- What monitoring is in place to model deer densities before and after control operations?
- What is the realistic desired deer density and, what is the prospect of achieving it? Is there a strategic control program in place?
- What reporting will there be on shooting effectiveness and wounding rates? Is this being independently monitored?
- What reporting will there be on the morphology and demography of the deer killed?

All of these questions are critically important if the community is to be in a position to form an informed view on the need for and the value of this particular control program. None of them should be difficult to answer if the basis for the program is sound.

ADA members have, quite understandably, asked what ADA is doing about this.

We are working diligently on the issues; we are pushing for accountability from our land managers and proper engagement with both the hunting community and with the regional communities we rely on so much. We won’t get results overnight, we would love to, but we won’t.

Fixing the issues on licenced land took nearly five years of campaigning with the help of external advisors. Getting butchering services available to recreational hunters took a six-year campaign and election promises. Getting access to Snake Island for hunters took over twenty years. We face a bureaucracy and a political class who are culturally unsympathetic to our way of life – it’s not just us, you just need to look at the issues that recreational fishermen are having with access to licenced crown land right now for an indication of exactly what we are up against.

We will get what we are pushing for, we will get it because we will work hard and consistently, and we will get it because we have the facts on our side.

If there was a simple way of getting the right outcomes, we would be leading that charge. The reality is that there are no actions which we can take which would get a different result in the short term.

There are things which we could do now (petitions, protests) to give an impression of action that would probably get us some kudos on social media, but it wouldn’t get results. It wouldn’t achieve anything in the real world.

We share your frustration and waving a placard and shouting slogans would release some tension; but we are not in the business of spreading false hope or choosing populism over results.