25 November 2020

The Australian Deer Association (ADA) yesterday joined with the Tasmanian Deer Advisory Committee (TDAC) to give evidence before an Australian Senate inquiry into the management of wild deer, pigs and goats in Australia.

The Committee holding the inquiry was meeting in Launceston, Tasmania, following extraordinary misrepresentations to it about the management of wild deer in that State. Scott Freeman (ADA) and Andrew Winwood (TDAC) presented to the Senators on behalf of recreational hunters.

The ADA and TDAC representatives comprehensively rebutted false information about the management of wild deer, including seasonal considerations and the role of recreational hunters.

The Invasive Species Council has been active in a misinformation campaign about wild deer management in Tasmania in what appears to be an ideologically driven effort to sideline hunters and engage in silly name calling about wild deer rather than focusing on their effective management.

Most of the ISC claims are easily debunked:

Claim:

Tasmania and Victoria are the only two States where deer are managed as game.

Fact:

Game status is a means of managing hunters, not game. Of the five States with notable established wild deer populations, three (New South Wales, Tasmania and Victoria) have Game Licencing for deer. These are also the States with the highest hunter numbers and with forms of public land access for hunting. 

In New South Wales (where the ISC operate from) and Victoria private landholders have broad exemptions from game regulations, in Tasmania landholders have access to unlimited crop protection permits with negligible bureaucracy.

South Australia and Queensland are the outliers – they have no means of quantifying the number, demographics, effort and success of hunters or of communicating with them to educate, inform and target effort.

Claim:

Tasmania’s deer population has ‘exploded’ in recent years.

Fact:

The recent aerial survey of deer in Tasmania found an increase of just 2,602 over the past five years. This is before significant changes were made in early 2020 to allow hunters and landholders to significantly increase their harvest.

Claim:

Recreational hunting is not an effective tool to control deer numbers.

Fact:

There are areas where recreational hunting is not the best tool – this does not hold in Tasmania.

In his evidence to the Senate Inquiry earlier this year, Professor Christopher Johnson from the University of Tasmania stated:

“I certainly think there's a sustainable deer population. I agree with David Bowman's comments that we really have to think in terms of density. At some point we have to decide what density of deer we think provides a balance of benefit and cost. I suspect it's a density that's probably a bit lower than the density we currently have. We should seek to contain the population so that we don't have to deal with impacts on vegetation that might be even more sensitive to deer browsing than the places where they currently occur. The biggest worry is about the effect that deer could have on vegetation on the World Heritage area, especially in the uplands.

Recreational hunting, it would seem, is having quite a significant impact on the rate of growth of the deer population at present. Some analysis based on the recent census suggests that the deer population would be growing twice as fast in the absence of recreational hunting. That suggests that we wouldn't need to do that much more hunting in order to contain the population density and population expansion. Probably it would mean incentivising hunters to concentrate their efforts on populations that are targeted for reduction, and push density down and hold it down. As I mentioned, there's a lot of experience on how this can be done in New Zealand. It can be quite effective. Hunting is a useful tool for management of deer populations. I do see that as being the key to doing it sustainably. I think by definition that could be sustainable if we understood the ecological density that we wanted. If we're using hunters to help achieve that density, the hunters are getting the benefit from that also."