Thread: venison vs brodifacoum

I've been researching this topic the last few days. The situation seems to be that commercial guys cannot harvest venison within 3 years/6km of brodifacoum application, and recreational hunters are recommended to follow the same rules (but farmed animals in the same areas have no withholding period). OTOH, MPI says there has been no recorded illness attributable to eating venison with brodi residues, and that the toxin accumulates mostly in the liver. Pigs are a different story of course with the potential for secondary poisoning from eating dead animals. For deer, the animals need to access the brodi directly. Brodifacoum is legally required to be used in bait stations, which are designed to limit or prevent non-target access to bait, so deer access to brodi is limited to what they can reach in bait stations, and any spillage. A good sized deer would need to eat almost 50kg of a bait such as 'pestoff' to reach the LD50 dosage, or in other words the total contents of 100 sentry bait stations filled to maximum capacity.

Every farm in my region is legally obliged to maintain possum numbers. Essentially this means every farm in this 26,000ha unit has brodifacoum and/or cyanide baits constantly. It works btw, I've only seen about 2 possums in the last decade, down from shooting 20-30 every night shooting back in the 80's.

I'm keeping all my bait stations filled but would only be going through maybe a bag of brodi (25kg) per year, and most of this is being buried untouched after it has gone stale. I don't know what the neighbours are doing, but presumably they are following the rules and using approved bait stations, out of reach of livestock. I've seen up to 12 deer at a time here (requiring 600kg of brodi bait to reach the LD50 rate). So it seems unlikely that any animal would be so toxic that it should be avoided completely.

So what is the consensus of feeling out there about taking some venison from feral deer in this situation?