WARO

WARO (wild animal recovery operation) and how it is managed in New Zealand has been in the news again. The wild venison price is up and our deer herds will continue too feel increased pressure of commercial helicopter hunting as it becomes lucrative once again to hunt wild venison from the air.

There are a number of issues at play here and it's easy to get sucked into the emotional side of things, no body likes the idea of all the trophy stags getting hammered off the tops in the velvet or finding a pile of steaming gut bags on the clearing in a riverbed after busting your ass to get there. If we can park the emotional side of things and take a wider look at this situation there is something very concerning at work here for hunters in New Zealand.

The relationship between recreational hunters and The Department of Conservation (DoC)

Situation (in brief):

DoC have reneged on the promise they made a few years back, that there would be a "comprehensive review" of the current WARO system (Mike Slater, Deputy Director General). When they called for this review, at the time they issued WARO operators with a reduced 3 year permit to allow for this review to take place. That meant that when the new WARO permits where issued (whats happening now) there would be time to take into account the findings of that review.

After the review was cancelled DoC entered into what have been described as a series of poorly notified meeting that had very poor turn outs to rubber stamp pulling the pin on the review. Now, this latest round of "consultation" was announced this month with feedback and submissions expected within a couple of days, again poorly notified. By the time this newsletter goes out the window for submissions will already be closed leaving no real time or opportunities for constructive feedback.

The issue with this is that on paper DoC have got away with it by doing the bare minimum of engagement with hunters, they're simply ticking the political boxes so that they can go ahead and do what they're going to do anyway, or least thats certainly how it appears.

Whats worse is that the chances are that the low number of submissions that they will likely end up with will could used against us because its in our nature as hunters not to stand up and make the effort to submit anything.

The result:

To me (and this is only my opinion) this whole consultation process is a farce and signals that DoC didn't want to really engage with hunters, or cared so little about the opinion of recreational hunters that they didn't spend the time or effort to organise a constructive consultation period.

I seems that hunters don't have a real voice in this fight, there is nobody with the right relationships and standing to lobby for hunter interests at the right level to give us a fair hearing.

Where are the NZDA? Where are GAC? Why are we always playing catch up or being treated like the naughty kids with our noses in the corner?

There are so many reasons and so many attributing factors to this issue, but until we change the culture enough on both sides that we can have constructive conversations with all parties involved, we're always going to be playing catch up.

We need to work closely with all parties to come up with a logical plan or simply put we're stuffed.

Matthew Gibson