Thread: Shooting to waste

Originally Posted by woods223

While culling to waste is somewhat distasteful that is the nature of the beast when trying to get numbers down.
Yes. Some stations in Nth Canterbury and Marlborough have used choppers recently and 700+ deer is not unheard of, certainly in Marlborough. These are numbers that recreational hunters would never come close to. One aspect is that you need to shoot any and all animals seen as efficiently as possible, something a lot of hunters can't accept. Also,some of the country involved makes a trip into Muzzle station almost look like a walk in the park and that place is regarded as one of the most remote stations in the country.
As alluded to by others, animal recovery for consumption requires MPI certification and you are required to have a supply contract with a processor before they will issue one. This costs money and among other things requires you being trained by the processor as to how to dress and present the animal to the receival depot. All animals have to have a GPS plot where taken. All 1080 treated areas and their buffer zones are a no go, along with any areas with a history of Brodifacoum application. All these areas have to be noted in your poisons summary for the property you are harvesting animals from as well as all neighbouring properties. If you are doing it by the book you also need a WARO permit for DOC land even when foot hunting and when I last checked with DOC Christchurch in late 2019 none had been issued for the South Island. WARO permit is free but the associated paperwork fee was $1000, which is a bit of a dis-incentive aye.
Overall, the MPI requirements are a bureaucratic nightmare to deal with. Processing costs aren't cheap, minimum numbers required.
How many out there are willing to go through this hassel for the feel good factor of not wasting good meat ? Not many I would hazard a guess.

Yep this sums it up very well.
3 stations I have hunted on have resorted to shooting to waste, just as a control measure. One owner said that this was the first time in 5 generations they have had to do this and was quite frustrated by the whole situation but they have run the farm and this costs them both in direct costs but lost time from staff employed to shoot not farm.
One of the guys flies his own machine and said to make wages shooting the fellow on his place he need to tip over 14 animals per hour, that's back at the truck, that's if he can get a buyer.
All 3 owners didn't want to do this but they have to.
Recreational hunters just cannot do this control work due to the terrain involved and vast areas that need to be covered.
Its a shame but in my book better to shoot to waste than drop the green rain.

Had some involvement in the Chch cull meat recovery - on edge of urban area so yes pretty easy logistics. Shooters gutted animals when shot and GPS'ed locations, recovery guys went in first thing and boned out the animals, packed it back to road and dropped meat off to a local home kill accredited butcher who minced, packaged and froze it and then someone dropped off to the food bank. One of the weird MPI rules was had to be an anonymous donation so the organisations behind it couldn't promote it or publicise it. Not sure how the FWF managed to get round this with their recent cull meat distribution?

I was culler for some time and we had similar rules(though not really enforced)
Of course you have to remember foot hunting rarely has you killing animals close to tracks or roads. Sometimes that happened and on the odd occasion I encouraged someone to pop off a track somewhere and load up a trailer. This someone was a capable bushman set up to butcher and salami/sausage everything.
What I couldn't do was encourage the local Indian mechanic to go looking for carcasses and this was the person usually bugging me for the animals.

I would often take legs or design a return trip to pick up legs. Of course the most important thing was successful destruction of a herd of animals. As it was mainly goats I was all out to kill whole mobs in one go as escaped nanny's and Billy's could get very wily very quick. Billy's could easily leave the animal group as they weren't as gregarious. These things meant a lower removal rate for the contract.
We were using hicap mags and semis and I would use my dog to find them and learn their beds. I would be sneaking in amoungst them before opening up so that I could get the leaders then sometimes a running battle would occur across multiple valleys as I chased down the escapees.
None of this was good for meat collection and many animals would have two shots quartered in through the rear leg. I would almost never neck or neck shoot.

Unfortunately it worked well and the blocks round here have no goats. We cleaned out the ranges(400+ goats)up against our local town which now have kiwi release there now.

Basically I'm saying for foot hunters it's not really feasible and the money lost to meat removal could be spent just buying meat.
Chopper culling is a different thing. Much of that is collectable and some culling we were I volved with, all animals were collected and given to local marae.

Originally Posted by Jake77

Had some involvement in the Chch cull meat recovery - on edge of urban area so yes pretty easy logistics. Shooters gutted animals when shot and GPS'ed locations, recovery guys went in first thing and boned out the animals, packed it back to road and dropped meat off to a local home kill accredited butcher who minced, packaged and froze it and then someone dropped off to the food bank. One of the weird MPI rules was had to be an anonymous donation so the organisations behind it couldn't promote it or publicise it. Not sure how the FWF managed to get round this with their recent cull meat distribution?

This is interesting. These are a couple of key things mentioned in that statement that goes against the MPI certified supppied requirement, hence why I suspect it was "anonymous". Bonning out in the field is NOT allowed, and given the close proximity to other properties, I suspect that Pesticide Summary rules and buffer zone areas would not have been followed.

FWF do meet the requirements and their animals are proceed by one of the few remaining wild game processors. Note that their recovery work is actually funded by ballot entires and not the sale of the meat.

Ground hunting and recovery in step bush blocks is near impossible given the time frames to meet the Risk Based processing requirements.

Culling to waste is going to ramp up significantly over the next few years given the rapidly growing deer population in New Zealand. This is already happening in some areas for goat, deer, tahr and wallaby, on public land too. Unfortunately, as mentioned a few times in thread, the average hunter is not doing enough to help the situation either by only shooting a handful of deer per year.

There are no serects about ground based culling operations in NZ, these havent ever stopped since the 50-60's, just the number of them have increased or decreased over the year and at the moment, we are on the increasinge side of it again.

And yes, my income comes from both recovery and culling of a range of difference animals.

Originally Posted by Cowboy

I was culler for some time and we had similar rules(though not really enforced)
Of course you have to remember foot hunting rarely has you killing animals close to tracks or roads. Sometimes that happened and on the odd occasion I encouraged someone to pop off a track somewhere and load up a trailer. This someone was a capable bushman set up to butcher and salami/sausage everything.
What I couldn't do was encourage the local Indian mechanic to go looking for carcasses and this was the person usually bugging me for the animals.

I would often take legs or design a return trip to pick up legs. Of course the most important thing was successful destruction of a herd of animals. As it was mainly goats I was all out to kill whole mobs in one go as escaped nanny's and Billy's could get very wily very quick. Billy's could easily leave the animal group as they weren't as gregarious. These things meant a lower removal rate for the contract.
We were using hicap mags and semis and I would use my dog to find them and learn their beds. I would be sneaking in amoungst them before opening up so that I could get the leaders then sometimes a running battle would occur across multiple valleys as I chased down the escapees.
None of this was good for meat collection and many animals would have two shots quartered in through the rear leg. I would almost never neck or neck shoot.

Unfortunately it worked well and the blocks round here have no goats. We cleaned out the ranges(400+ goats)up against our local town which now have kiwi release there now.

Basically I'm saying for foot hunters it's not really feasible and the money lost to meat removal could be spent just buying meat.
Chopper culling is a different thing. Much of that is collectable and some culling we were I volved with, all animals were collected and given to local marae.

Hi Cowboy. I always find your posts on this matter interesting. Are you able to share which DOC blocks were cleared of goats? Can't see what harm it would do and might save local hunters a wasted day or two.

I'll pm you
Here is one from Pukenui. Was a short distance from Maunu Rd.

Do I spy bullers? The mark of a true bushman

They're cut down versions of the taller ones. Can't remember the name now. Edit: perths?? I liked a bit more height. I would cut a peice of steel box section in half and cut teeth into it. These were then bolted in front of the heel. Worked well. Allowed me to hop from root to root using my 'claws' as I called them. Funny how you could go from avoiding slippery roots to look g for them.
I then went to strap ones and changed to a boot with a better sharper side to the sole and the bullers were super dangerous on some of the steep goat ground,/bluffs etc.

Ashleys.

Originally Posted by Cowboy

I'll pm you
Here is one from Pukenui. Was a short distance from Maunu Rd.

Cool. I've heard an old timer talking about walking through the city centre with a rifle on his way to a hunt in the Pukenui Forest. How times have changed!

Ashleys. That's them. I used to cut the top two lace holes off so they were short enough, otherwise they bit into your shin.

Yeah MB. It was some careful shooting with the town that close.
Then on the other side is the dam with the concern of an animal the water. Had to drag any animals well away from water ways.

Originally Posted by TeRei

S and D is starting next week in the Raukumaras via 500D.

The ground cullers have been doing search and destroy in there for a few years now and still have a lot of hours still to do this year.

We done a culling job over a couple of days last week, 50 odd predominantly hinds shot on a farm.
He has had hunters taking deer regularly for years, sometimes every weekend for several weeks in a row there are animals being shot. But sometimes recreational hunters can't get enough and once the numbers reach a certain point they explode. Once they are that high the problem is regular recreational hunting does nothing but educate the animals.
It is hard looking at them and seeing waste and if there was a viable option to get the meat out of there most clients would be more than happy to get them utilised.
Problem is the use of pesticides, particularly brodifacaum don't help matters as does Tb and lastly, low venison prices.

Originally Posted by Cowboy

Then on the other side is the dam with the concern of an animal the water. Had to drag any animals well away from water ways.

But I guess it was not such a big deal they'd probably been crapping in the water their entire lives?

Originally Posted by Ben Waimata

But I guess it was not such a big deal they'd probably been crapping in the water their entire lives?

Decomposing bodies leaching into a waterway is a bit different to a animal having a pee or a poo close to/in a water way I’d imagine.


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Originally Posted by tiroahunta

Decomposing bodies leaching into a waterway is a bit different to a animal having a pee or a poo close to/in a water way I’d imagine.


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I live close to Havelock North..... tell that to the people trying to use HN water crisis to reorganise the 'three waters'.

But yeah I'm not keen on dead animals in my water supply either. All of us on rainwater tanks have had the odd possum flavour in our water supply at some time, tasted bad but never made us sick for some reason.