Advocacy Alert: MPI's New Deer & Pig Programme

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Originally Posted by Nugget connaisseur

For hunters and alot of people it does feel like a waste shooting deer and leaving them where they fall, or shooting a few extra and only taking the back steaks.
Yet no one has a problem doing that with goats.

A mindset change from resource to managed pest would help ALOT.

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Could be a slippery slope though.
There's been a lot of time and effort put in to get game animals removed from the pest list to safe guard their future.
Canada geese are on that slope.

be interesting to see what happens- to the best of my knowledge MPI would only apply on private land- they would have little or no say on the Public Conservation estate i.e DOC land and I don't believe they have rights under the Wild Animal Control Act - that remains with DOC -so the way I see it they can come up with plans but how much clout they have to implement those plans remains to be seen

With all the .22 calibre centerfires around now, Im surprised theres a deer problem at all..

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Originally Posted by whanahuia

With all the .22 calibre centerfires around now, Im surprised theres a deer problem at all..

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We are getting through them. Almost down to the nervous ones that have been scared by misses from .270's.

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Originally Posted by Tahr

We are getting through them. Almost down to the nervous ones that have been scared by misses from .270's.

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Hahaha, Close enough. I was aiming to get called a bitch today as well.:D

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Originally Posted by Tentman

My take - arising from the lean years landowners of many land use types were happy to use the H&S thing as an excuse to keep hunters out wether it applied or not. Most would now understand that it's a "not applying" thing but old habits die hard. And if you can make your problem (tree or crop damage etc) someone else's with the possibility of getting someone else to pay for it ( the crown or local government, aka yours and my money) then so much the better . . . Is the way thier minds work.

Having a boundary with DOC etc was great when deer where worth something or hard to get . . . But look who's crying now it's a liability!

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Agree .... and there's a fair bit of bullshit being introduced to the discussion as another front in the anti-forestry conversions campaigns.

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Originally Posted by Tentman

I've got a cobber involved in the Banks Peninsula pig programme. They tried Rec hunters (hopelesss) so called professional pig hunters (almost as hopeless), helicopters (expensive with only mediocre long term results). The solution actually working just now with significant control achieved are high tech monitored capture pens operated over a wide number of co-operating landowners in accordance with a planned strategy.

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One step you are missing between the helicopters and the trapping was a team of professional hunters working the area intensively for 4 months, night shooting, dogging and indicating to get numbers to a level where the trapping could somewhat keep on top of them. Members of that team are still required to do mop up work from time to time. Without them the trapping as effective as it is would still be going no where.

What is important is actually having objectives and a plan. You will never achieve management without intentionally aiming to. "control" is an activity and not an outcome, "deer under control" or "out of control" is meaningless - the level of population required depends on the level of impact on values a person is willing to accept. This is wildly different across different land tenures. To achieve collective management across land tenures, agreement on acceptable objectives is necessary.

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Originally Posted by gimp

What is important is actually having objectives and a plan. You will never achieve management without intentionally aiming to. "control" is an activity and not an outcome, "deer under control" or "out of control" is meaningless - the level of population required depends on the level of impact on values a person is willing to accept. This is wildly different across different land tenures. To achieve collective management across land tenures, agreement on acceptable objectives is necessary.

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Which isn't going to happen.

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Originally Posted by Flyblown

Which isn't going to happen.

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Not at a large scale. My view is that NZ is a big place. To achieve management across all of it, it'll have to be treated as a patchwork of smaller places where individuals make local agreements that suit their values.

how do you eat an elephant? one spoon at a time

And in some places, there'll never be an accommodation.

The venison bubble of the 1970s was really unfortunate. It was a confluence of unique economic factors that led to a precipitous decline in deer numbers. It is unfortunate because it gives people the impression that it's possible again. It isn't. The economic factors will never re-appear, the world is different, deer are more widespread, there are deer species more widespread that are not economically valuable, and commercial incentives will never achieve population reductions for goats, pigs, etc.

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Originally Posted by Ned

Playing devils advocate, if hunters are the solution, then how have we managed to get here? (This is kind of rhetorical).

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We've got here because there is no intentional co-ordinated management. Disconnected individuals doing their own thing for their own reasons (WARO, rec hunters, some control by various people) will never achieve an overall management objective if there isn't one stated and a plan to get there.


Rec hunters haven't failed to control anything - we weren't trying to, and no-one has told us we're supposed to be, or supported us to do it.


If they did, it's highly unlikely that management to sufficiently low impacts for biodiversity purposes on priority conservation land could be achieved solely through the use of rec hunting effort.

you are on to it Gimp very sage words and very right - most hunters cannot get their head around that shooting a few deer in an area is not control its fun - be it possums or deer one has to remove over 90% of a population and keep it there with regular control to even start to call it effective - a population can crash if it has become to low to sustain itself - goats on Mt Taranaki are a good example - but the sheer size of the problem in NZ with possums means its not realistic for control except for small select areas - from the Napier Taupo road North to Raukumara is a million acres or more of bush with virtually no control of opossums - especially Te Urewera where numbers must be thru the roof

“Rec hunters haven't failed to control anything - we weren't trying to, and no-one has told us we're supposed to be, or supported us to do it.”

Rec hunters haven’t been “told” to control animals but it certainly been suggested by the likes of NZDA, Wapiti foundation, Tahr foundation and others over the years. But hunters tend to get tunnel vision about bagging a trophy, not shooting females or inferior animals for fear of disturbing an area. If a bit more culling had taken place over the years maybe the current problem wouldn’t be quite so bad, maybe not. Who knows.

my quess woods 223 would not have made a difference except maybe small areas the pop of deer on private is way to high in many areas and its been a lock up mentality by owners and before they know it problem

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Originally Posted by woods223

“Rec hunters haven't failed to control anything - we weren't trying to, and no-one has told us we're supposed to be, or supported us to do it.”

Rec hunters haven’t been “told” to control animals but it certainly been suggested by the likes of NZDA, Wapiti foundation, Tahr foundation and others over the years. But hunters tend to get tunnel vision about bagging a trophy, not shooting females or inferior animals for fear of disturbing an area. If a bit more culling had taken place over the years maybe the current problem wouldn’t be quite so bad, maybe not. Who knows.

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I'm including those groups in that statement. None of them (except FWF) have any mandate to manage anything, or any structured management objectives. Of course it has resulted in numbers continuing to increase.