Thread: NZ Hunter

WRT shooting so as to frighten or offend, if a case arrives in court without a fixed definition then the test is "what would a reasonable person think". This is where it gets messy, as we are a minority here in NZ (I'm talking about hunters, not reasonable people), and over time the familiarity of Joe Average with firearms has diminished. I've not heard of anyone who was a hunter rather than a dickhead with a rifle ending up in court over this - has anybody any examples, and how did it play out?

That said, the NZ public lands (DOC estate/Crown land, call it what you want) have been hunted pretty much as long as they have existed as a legal concept, so it is not unreasonable to think there may be shooting there or thereabouts. In an area with a high concentration of animals it would be even more likely. I sometimes hunt around the Waihohonu on the round the mountain track (Ruapehu) which is a VERY heavily used great walk track, and have never had anything other than positive interactions with people I meet. I spent a couple of nights in the Oturere hut with a visiting American and we had all manner of people wanting to talk and understand what we were hunting, where, the rules around bla, bla bla, and all very positive.