Want more national parks deer?

ON Wednesday, November 13, Jeff Bourman from The Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party, Member for Eastern Victoria in the Legislative Council, called on the government to “open appropriate tracts of applicable national parks at suitable times to recreational hunters to increase opportunities for Victoria’s burgeoning recreational deer-hunting community to engage in their chosen outdoor recreation.”

He said that 220,000 people in Victoria have a shooters licence, and that the activity has significant economic impacts. He was critical of the cost of helicopter culling, and believes that if deer are reclassified as a pest species, fewer will be shot.

He said, “If deer are declared a pest, then the landowner is required to control them at the landowner’s cost. Game animals are managed by the government, and therefore in this case we pay to hunt game animals. What you can do on a farm, on private land, now, obviously subject to animal welfare concerns, is shoot them any time of the day or night, as long as you abide by safety rules and calibre rules and such. So to declare them a pest would do nothing except make farmers have to pay for it, whereas now it is the government’s problem.”

He believes that the government should investigate “whether we can get recreational hunters into more appropriate existing national parks at appropriate times to reduce the number of deer.”

Katherine Copsey from the Greens responded, “Rather than giving open slather to hunters in more of our national parks, the government should be urgently removing deer from the Wildlife Act 1975 to reflect their true status as an invasive pest species. It is ridiculous that deer are protected under the Wildlife Act. The reason that this act now protects invasive feral…

Image: Legislative council agrees to motion asking that the government “open appropriate tracts of applicable national parks at suitable times to recreational hunters to increase opportunities for Victoria’s burgeoning recreational deer-hunting community to engage in their chosen outdoor recreation.”

Credits: -Mydhili Bayyapunedi