Aerial culling recommences in Victoria

Sunday 22 February 2021

Yesterday (Saturday) evening, Parks Victoria sent formal advice to the ADA, SSAA, GMA and the VNPA of the next tranche of aerial culling in Eastern Victoria.

This follows a rushed briefing delivered to ADA and SSAA on Friday.

The control programs (both aerial and ground shooting) are being funded from the Victorian Government’s bushfire recovery budget and will be targeting deer, pigs, goats and foxes – but not horses.

Of particular interest to deer hunters will be the aerial culling on the Dargo High Plains and in the Avon Wilderness. Both ADA and SSAA have consistently advocated that, if these programs have to happen in hunting areas at all, they be timed to minimise disruption to recreational deer hunters - preferably during the closed season. Parks Victoria have made some accomodation to this by timing operations outside of the peak hunting months, but not to the degree which we would like or that hunters would expect.

We do appreciate that bushfire recovery is critical and that alpine bogs and peatlands are particularly vulnerable environments, however, we have seen no real efforts from land managers to target the effort of Victoria's 40,000+ licenced deer hunters, opting instead for expensive, disruptive and wasteful aerial culling operations.  

The Dargo high plains operation is scheduled for 1-4 March and 19-23 April, targeting alpine peatlands and bogs around Mt Tabletop, although the closure area will be considerably larger than that.

The program in the Avon Wilderness Park is scheduled for 2 days between 12-16 April. 

Whilst we welcome an improvement in consultation and consideration of recreational hunters, we continue to push for greater accountability for these aerial control programs. 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 has previously reported to us on ‘the success’ of the broader aerial control program which has been operating since early February 2020 and 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 as much as 215,000 wild deer a year in Victoria, mostly sambar, mostly on public land, mostly female. Sadly that wasn't the case last year because of the pandemic and, with the added impact of bushfire that will have an impact on deer management for years to come.