South Australian deer management efforts continue to ignore hunters, burn taxpayer dollars and deliver poor results

29 August 2021

A recent article in the local Adelaide media has highlighted the extent to which the current South Australian Government approach to wild deer management is failing by just about every logical measure.

Key points:

- Millions of dollars are being spent with no transparency or obvious gain

- Current policy appears to be failing to meet stated objectives

- Recreational hunters ignored by the government despite significant role in management and triple-bottom-line benefits to the State

The article quoted the ‘National Deer Management Co-Ordinator’, Dr Annelise Wiebkin, saying that “publicly funded programs killed more than 2500 feral (sic) deer in SA last financial year and about 2700 the year before that”. Dr Weibkin did not reveal the cost of that control; however, experience from elsewhere tells us that it would likely be somewhere between $750,000 - $1,000,000 per year. By contrast, the hunting program run by just one of the ADA’s three South Australian Branches kills in the vicinity of 1000 deer every year using the efforts of around 150 active hunting members. Rather than costing the South Australian taxpayer large sums, the ADA program delivers returns to local landholders and the surrounding communities.

The article also reported on South Australian Government data indicating that the range of wild deer in South Australia is increasing. This highlights that the ‘South Australian Feral (sic) Deer Policy’, released by the South Australian Government with much fanfare over two years ago, fails to meet its own basic objectives, despite a significant expenditure of public money.

The policy is heavy on rhetoric but fails to outline any key criteria for the effective management of wild deer other than a recommendation that agencies report on the effectiveness of culling programs. Unfortunately, the South Australian Government does not appear to have met even its own (relatively low) standard.

The South Australian Government cannot (or will not) tell the public the answers to some fundamental questions about wild deer control, such as;

• What is the relationship between wild deer and damage to assets in a given control area?
• What is the current density of wild deer in the control area?
• What is the desired density to address the damage?
• What monitoring is in place to assess the impact of control on the asset in question?
• What monitoring is in place to assess the impact of control on the density of the deer?
• What measures are in place to ensure high standards of animal welfare in government-funded control programs?
• What measures are in place to ensure full and public disclosure of the costs of government-funded control programs?

The managers of any well designed and run deer control program should have the answers to those questions on hand.

The policy, also, despite significant, evidence-based input from the ADA, not only ignores the actual and potential role of recreational hunters in wild deer management, it specifically and explicitly excludes us. It seeks to actively sideline the group (recreational hunters) that not only kills a significant number of wild deer every year (considerably more than Government funded programs do), but that actually delivers net economic gains to the State in doing so. We cannot speak to the motivation behind that approach, but it appears to be grounded more in ideology than in a real and practical desire to see more dead deer.