\u201cNobody is really taking responsibility for it, or know how they can deal with it,\u201d Arathoon said.<\/p>\n
DoC\u2019s acting wild animals manager, Mark Ryan, said the department was aware of the ongoing deer issue.<\/p>\n
\u201cUnder the Wild Animal Control Act 1977, [DoC] is responsible for managing populations of wild animals at priority conservation sites on public conservation land,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese deer are spreading from private farmland, with no public conservation land for approximately 15km.\u201d<\/p>\n
DoC can enter private land without landowners\u2019 permission but that provision is generally only used to protect high-priority areas and after all other attempts to work collaboratively with the landowner have been exhausted.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe understand some private landowners around the area have been carrying out deer controls on their lands,\u201d Ryan said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe recommend residents looking for assistance in controlling deer on their property to contact local hunting clubs, such as the New Zealand Deerstalkers\u2019 Whanganui Branch, to see if their members might be able to assist. <\/p>\n
\u201cOther deterrents like electric fencing or dogs could be helpful, and working with neighbours to manage numbers can help make control more effective.\u201d<\/p>\n
The deer were wandering on to roads, including the busy Somme Parade, making it dangerous, Arathoon said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith this amount of them wandering around, something awful is going to happen \u2013 you can\u2019t have deer dashing through.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is Whanganui; you don\u2019t expect deer to leap out across the road.\u201d<\/p>\n
Recently, Arathoon discovered a dead deer that had been hit by a vehicle outside her property.<\/p>\n
Whanganui District Council regulatory and compliance operations manager Jason Shailer said the animal management team only responded to reports of wild deer if the animals were creating a traffic hazard.<\/p>\n
The council assisted, with police where appropriate, to reduce risks to road users, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cHowever, managing wild deer on private property is outside the council\u2019s jurisdiction,\u201d Shailer said.<\/p>\n
Horizons\u2019 animal pests team leader Daniel Hurley said the regional council did not have the authority to deal with deer on private land because deer are not included in the Regional Pest Management Plan (RPMP).<\/p>\n
Controlling deer was up to individual landowners or occupiers, Hurley said.<\/p>\n
In recent times, Horizons had not been made aware of any instances or reports about the deer.<\/p>\n
Delhi Village resident Richard Thompson said he had requested that Horizons schedule deer as a pest in Whanganui so it could undertake pest control.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s affecting us here at Delhi Village, where deer come in and eat plants in our private gardens … also up in our forest, there\u2019s constantly deer moving through there,\u201d Thompson said.<\/p>\n
Thompson believed there were more deer around now and said the camera he set up in the forest picked up movement \u201calmost every day\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey damage young trees that we\u2019re planting so I\u2019ve pretty well stopped doing any replacement forestry planting until I get the deer situation sorted,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have some areas that are retired from production, given that we are reverting that into native bush, and the deer are eating out all of the palatable species, which means the second wave of native plants just get eaten and hammered so everything dies.\u201d<\/p>\n
Delhi Village resident Richard Thompson would like deer to be deemed pests in Whanganui so Horizons can step in.<\/p>\n
Another resident, Ben O\u2019Leary, said he did not mind the deer but he could understand why some residents were concerned.<\/p>\n
\u201cI like seeing them about, it\u2019s something different,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll of the visitors I have over think it\u2019s awesome but if you are trying to maintain a garden, that would be a different story, obviously.\u201d<\/p>\n
Arathoon acknowledged some residents did not mind the deer.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are two sides of the coin,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course, some people think they\u2019re lovely and attractive, but people once thought possums were cute too.\u201d<\/p>\n
Horizons is scheduled to review the RPMP, as required by the Biosecurity Act 1993, from September 26, 2027, as it will be 10 years since the plan was last reviewed as a whole. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe are undertaking a work programme associated with this review,\u201d Hurley said. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe are currently in the discussion document phase of the work programme and are looking to seek community views on the issues and options early-mid this year.\u201d<\/p>\n
Information on the RPMP review is available on Horizons\u2019 website horizons.govt.nz.<\/p>\n
Feedback and queries can be emailed to regionalpestmanagementplanreview@horizons.govt.nz.<\/p>\n
Fin Ocheduszko Brown is a multimedia journalist based in Whanganui.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI don\u2019t think that is an expense that I should have to resort to,\u201d she said. \u201cIt just…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":360579,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[4666,138298,39663,128676,13611,35502,436,138299,1776,28195,20639,26630,138297,23816,90,7736,53543,138301,82330,138300,56,54,55,113199,12984,4407,3674],"class_list":["post-360578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-and","tag-aramoho","tag-around","tag-councils","tag-deer","tag-doc","tag-for","tag-frustrated","tag-in","tag-limited","tag-number","tag-residents","tag-roaming","tag-say","tag-science","tag-solutions","tag-some","tag-streets","tag-suburb","tag-suburbs","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-whanganui","tag-wild","tag-wildlife","tag-with"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360578"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360578\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/360579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}