Game Council: Declare Invasive Species Council feral, not wild deer
Declaring wild deer a feral pest species in New South Wales would hurt the environment and small country towns currently battling a rural recession, Game Council NSW says.
“This retrograde step would harm, not help control of feral deer in semi-urban areas, it would lead to greater traffic, environmental and population problems with excessive numbers of deer,” Game Council Chairman Robert Borsak said today.
Mr Borsak was responding to a call from the political lobby group - the Invasive Species Council - which wants wild deer treated as feral animals.
At present, wild deer are declared a game animal in NSW under the Game and Feral Animal Control Act 2002 and can be removed by hunters with a Game Council licence, under a system that brings significant hunting tourism income to the State.
“We already have nearly 10,000 licensed hunters in NSW who have removed thousands of wild deer from private land, semi-urban areas and declared State forests - and at the same time these hunters pump $40 million a year into regional areas,” Mr Borsak said.
“The Invasive Species Council is a small unofficial lobby group seeking to impose extremist environmental messages onto governments but while groups like these talk, voluntary conservation hunters are out there providing genuine and measurable results for the environment,” he said.
“In fact, if we are talking about ‘feral pests’, well that name describes ill-informed nuisance organisations such as the Invasive Species Council.”
Mr Borsak said that the NSW game licence system, working in conjunction with local conservation hunting groups, was already satisfactorily reducing deer numbers in hot spots.
“Problem deer are being removed by Game Council-licensed hunters at Port Macquarie, Coomba Park, Cowra, Wollongong, Bouddi, and Badgerys Creek, and Cowra” he said.
“New Zealand tried the pest animal approach by government departments for over 70 years with professional hunters and widespread 1080 poisoning - it didn’t work, and now they are establishing their own Big Game Hunting Council and going back to managing wild deer as a game species and using hunters to help control their populations. We need to learn from their example,” Mr Borsak said.
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