After a sham consulting period that ignored recreational hunters, who made the most submissions, and reflect the largest stakeholders in the room, and who harvest the greatest number of wild deer from the landscape, the National Feral (sic) Deer plan has been released.
The plan is effectively a propaganda piece that spreads misinformation and draws false comparisons between wild deer and rabbits that do not pass the pub test.
The plan’s inability to even name wild deer properly reflects the intent and hypocrisy of the plan. The plan states it doesn’t want to demonise deer, yet this is exactly what this plan was written to do by a working group that featured no representation of recreational deer hunters but instead had members with links to the Invasive Species Council and the Centre for Invasive Species Solutions. This research centre focuses on developing poisons.
The plan quickly suggests deer cost the economy $91 million a year but deliberately omits that recreational hunting contributes close to $500 million annually whilst supporting thousands of jobs.
Of the minor changes made to the plan from its draft, due to the significant backlash received regarding its primary goal of developing toxic poisons, the toxic logo for the poison was changed in a ham-fisted attempt at obfuscation.
The plan also made further attempts to minimise the impact of recreational hunting, despite scientific evidence demonstrating that recreational hunting has significantly reduced population growth in Tasmania to 5% and in parts of Victoria to 15%. The plan also fails to explain the nuance of public land access whilst belittling recreational hunting as being unable to impact population growth, suggesting that recreational hunting is ineffective, even though huge tracts of public land are unavailable for recreational hunting across the country.
Concerningly further misinformation continues to be spread about wild deer, including suggestions from the Environment Minister that wild deer kill threatened wildlife species, despite being vegetarian.
Ultimately, some of the plan reflects much of what is already occurring in states such as New South Wales, Tasmania and Victoria with their ongoing deer management programs, with another layer of bureaucracy included that will ultimately be used as a sinister stalking horse for the poison industry.
The full plan can be read here.
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