WINTER 2009 Vol. 46 No. 2$1095 inc gst

On the road

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Photo © DNR

Photo © DNR

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Announcing the start of the deer hunting season in March 2009, the New South

Wales Game Council’s large, full-colour newspaper ads carried the tagline ‘Hunters – First in Conservation’.

‘Voluntary Conservation Hunting’ is a new guise for recreational hunting, used recently to justify granting hunters access to vast areas of public lands, including national parks, in eastern Australia.

In Victoria earlier this year, the Brumby government announced it would allow recreational hunting in the newly created River Red Gum National Parks. No public debate was invited on this major shift in the national park ethos. The government also proposes a program to subsidise the hunting of deer and native birds on private properties.

In NSW, despite strong protest from conservation, animal welfare and community groups, the state government has granted hunters access to more than two million hectares of state forests since 2006. More than $6.4 million in government funding has gone to the NSW Game Council in the past two years to manage and promote recreational hunting.

The governments claim these moves will benefit the environment, with NSW Primary Industries Minister Ian MacDonald telling parliament that recreational hunting was a ‘sensible option’ to ‘help to eradicate feral animals’.

Sounds good; looks bad

On the surface his assertion seems reasonable. Hunters kill feral animals. You would expect this would lead to less environmental damage. In its latest annual report (June 2008) the NSW Game Council said hunters (about 9000 have been licensed) had conducted ‘important environmental work’ in killing 4076 rabbits, 1081 pigs, 1037 goats, 724 foxes, 410 deer, 242 hares, 136 cats and 55 dogs in state forests that year.

‘As each fox kills about 26 native birds every year, that means there are 20,000 more native birds alive in our state forests including honeyeaters, parrots, kites, and magpies,’ claims the March 2008 newsletter of the NSW Sporting Shooters Association.

But there are major flaws in this simplistic ‘a dead pest is one less pest’ logic.

First, it fails to account for the prodigious capacity of feral animals to quickly replace those killed. Worse than this ineffectiveness is the risk that more widespread recreational hunting will exacerbate feral animal problems as hunters seek to maximise hunting opportunities.

There are also other well-known risks – impacts on native wildlife, compromised animal welfare, human safety and human enjoyment of public lands – but the focus here is impacts on feral animal control.

Adding up the numbers

Population reduction is difficult to achieve because animals that are killed are often replaced by those that otherwise

Oh deer: ‘conservation hunting’ in Australia

B Y D R C A R O L B O O T H

Is licensed recreational hunting of feral animals an effective way to reduce their impact? It may look good at first glance, but further investigation reveals many flaws.

Above left: Fallow deer (Dama dama), widespread in south-eastern Australia, have escaped from deer farms and been illegally released. Protected as a hunting resource in Victoria, NSW and Tasmania, they are a declared pest species in Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia. Below left: As shown in this failed gap regeneration site in Victoria due to damage by sambar deer, Littoral Rainforest and Coastal Vine Thickets of Eastern Australia, listed as a critically endangered ecological communities under the Commonwealth Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, are threatened by feral deer impacts. Above: Sambar browsing has damaged muttonwood (Rapanea howittiana) in the Mitchell River National Park.

Photo courtesy Rohan Bilney

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By creating a stronger financial and political basis for the hunting lobby, the commercialisation of recreational hunting also makes it logistically and politically harder to eliminate feral animal populations for conservation purposes.

Recreational hunting groups claim to be motivated for conservation, but they have strongly opposed important conservation measures. They campaigned against the declaration of the River Red Gum National Parks in Victoria, where they will now be allowed to hunt, and against the declaration of deer as threatening processes in NSW and Victoria.

The Australian Deer Association took the Victorian government to court to try to stop the declaration of sambar, an introduced deer native to Asia, as a threat to biodiversity under the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act. The association’s vision is for deer to be managed as a ‘valuable public resource’, and ‘for the benefit of the deer themselves’. Because of hunter influence, deer are fully or partially protected in Victoria, NSW and Tasmania.

Allowing recreational hunting on public lands for feral animal control provides state governments with an excuse not to undertake proper control.

Other collateral damage from recreational hunting includes the escape of hunting dogs, and shooting and disturbance of native animals. (See ‘The damage deer do’, p 37.)

would not have survived. For some feral animals, half or more of the population must be culled annually just to maintain the status quo. That’s why virtually every bounty scheme in Australia and overseas has failed. They typically reduce pest numbers by no more than 2–10 percent.

The 724 foxes killed by hunters in NSW state forests in 2007/08 would probably not amount to even 1 percent of the targeted populations. As NSW Primary Industries Minister Ian MacDonald told parliament, the estimated fox population in Australia exceeds 7 million. Because there is a large ‘doomed surplus’ of young foxes, biologists estimate that more than 65 percent need to be killed annually to reduce a population. This estimate for Victoria, which informed the government’s assessment of the Victorian fox bounty by Marks and Fairbridge 2005, would likely also apply for NSW.

Victoria had a fox bounty in 2002-03 that resulted in 170,000 dead foxes. It was abandoned because it didn’t work. The government review found the bounty made a difference in only about 4 percent of the state, where hunting access was easy.

How the problem can spread

The greatest concern about these programs is that maverick hunters have been establishing many new populations of feral animals to create more prey. By opening up vast areas of public land to recreational hunting, governments are creating incentives for hunters to spread feral animals even further.

Deer are probably the worst emerging feral animal threat in eastern Australia, and hunters are responsible for the majority of new populations. Of the 218 wild herds recorded in Australia in a 2000 survey, an estimated 58 percent came from deliberate releases, mostly within the previous few years (35 percent were from deer farm escapes or releases).

A NSW government survey recorded another 30 deer

populations between 2002 and 2004. In NSW national parks and state forests, deer have been found with ear tags from farms far away, suggesting deliberate introduction.

In southwest Western Australia, where feral pig numbers are increasing and populations are appearing in new areas, a genetics study indicated that movement by people had a lot to do with new pig invasions. The researchers concluded that feral pigs were being ‘deliberately and illegally translocated to supplement recreational hunting stocks’.

Conservation or commercial?

Promoting hunting on private lands for reward, as the Victorian Government proposes for deer, also encourages the deliberate increase and spread of feral animals. Under the scheme landholders would receive direct or in-kind payments from hunters, and access to government incentives and subsidies to improve habitat and hunting conditions. In one of the worst examples of environmental vandalism, buffalo, deer and blackbuck antelope were recently freed by two hunting enterprises on unfenced land on Cape York Peninsula.

Above: Rusa deer have defoliated this sandpaper fig (Ficus coronata) in Royal National Park. Top: Although recreational hunters target feral foxes, the state of Victoria has found bounty programs ineffective in controlling fox numbers. Below left: Feral deer are, indeed, here. Minister for Primary Industries, Fisheries and Rural and Regional Queensland Tim Mulherin notes that, ‘... the greatest threat to our sensitive Queensland environment is the possibility of sambar, hog deer, and other tropical deer species being released in the Wet Tropics.’

Photo courtesy Zoe Phillips, The Weekly Times

Photo © Tim Low

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The damage deer doThe introduction to feral deer in The Mammals of Australia, 3rd edition (2008) warns that they ‘could be on their way to becoming Australia’s next major pest’.

In recognition of the harm they can cause, feral deer have recently been listed as threatening processes in NSW (specifically the herbivory and degradation caused by five feral species) and Victoria (specifically the impact of sambar on the biodiversity of native vegetation).

The NSW Scientific Committee found that the impacts of deer in conservation reserves include ‘overgrazing, browsing, trampling, ring-barking, antler rubbing, dispersal of weeds ..., creation of trails, concentration of nutrients, exposing soils to erosion/accelerating erosion, and the subsequent degradation of water quality in creek and river systems.’ In Sydney’s Royal National Park there are fewer understorey plant species in areas with high deer density than in areas with low deer density, 54 percent fewer in littoral rainforest, for example. Several threatened plant species and communities were judged at risk.

In Victoria, Peel and colleagues (2005) reported that the effects of browsing by sambar can be ‘devastating’, especially for rainforest plants during drought. The understorey in heavily browsed areas becomes stunted and is eventually eliminated. Antler rubbing is also a serious threat to some rainforest plants, including the endangered buff hazelwood (Symplocos thwaitsii) and the threatened yellowwood (Acronychia oblongifolia). Probably the most severe impact is the loss of regenerating plants due to the destruction of regeneration refuges (e.g. thickets of thorny and stinging species) that protect palatable plants from browsing animals. Sambar damage has caused contraction of native plant communities in some areas and their replacement by weed-dominated grasslands or by bare ground. Regeneration is failing in many rainforest stands, and major tracts of rainforest may be lost. Victoria’s Scientific Advisory Committee listed 13 rare or threatened plant species significantly threatened by sambar and five threatened ecological communities affected. Another ecological community, littoral rainforest, has been listed as nationally threatened under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.

Native animal populations are affected by loss of habitat, and also by increased predation due to sambar trails creating easy access for feral predators. Some predators are also benefiting from the several hundred tonnes of sambar remains left each year in forests by hunters interested only in antler trophies. This elevates their population, creating more problems for small mammal species.

A different approach

Because feral animal control is difficult and costly, pest experts have recommended it be undertaken as part of carefully planned programs, with clear, realistic goals set in terms of biodiversity benefits (not numbers of pests killed), using effective and humane methods, and with monitoring. For most feral species, ground shooting is not considered very effective, and recommended only as a supplement to other methods, when conducted by expert shooters.

In a South Australian reserve in 2002, 65 recreational hunters shot 44 deer in four days – less than the annual population increase. In the same area five years later, one professional aerial shooter took just four hours to kill 182 deer – more than 90 percent of the estimated population. In three years of pig control in a Florida reserve, recreational hunters removed less than 13 percent of the number of pigs taken by professional cullers over just two years.

In justifying recreational hunting in state forests, the NSW Primary Industries Minister Ian MacDonald told parliament that after habitat loss, ‘...invasive species are the single greatest threat to Australia’s unique and treasured biodiversity’. Surely that warrants government support for effective and professional control programs, not for ineffective and risky amateur efforts. The $6.4 million given to recreational hunters in NSW over the past two years could have funded some real control programs.

But support for recreational hunting is clearly not environmental. The name of conservation is being used cynically to cultivate support from the hunting/shooting political parties and to placate an Australian populace that largely opposes hunting for sport. Conservationists should be very worried about these trends.

DR CAROL BOOTH is a policy officer for the Invasive Species Council Australia. All information referred to here is referenced in two reports, A Deer Mistake and Is Recreational Hunting Effective for Feral Animal Control?, available on the Invasive Species Council Australia website: www.invasives.org.au/hunting.html

Sambar deer have browsed heavily on muttonwood in Mitchell River National Park dry rainforest.

BY OPENING UP VAST AREAS OF PUBLIC LAND TO RECREATIONAL HUNTING, GOVERNMENTS ARE CREATING INCENTIVES FOR HUNTERS TO SPREAD FERAL ANIMALS EVEN FURTHER.

Photo courtesy Rohan Bilney

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