Australia’s landscapes never evolved with hard-hoofed animals like deer – and the damage is relentless.
Across the country, feral deer are trashing, trampling and polluting bushland and waterways, pushing deeper into new areas every year.
What they leave behind is stripped understorey, eroded soils and degraded rivers – the very foundations wildlife depend on.
The damage doesn’t stop at the bush. Deer are turning up on roads, driving collisions and insurance costs, while farmers are left carrying the burden through damaged crops, fencing and livelihoods.
Right now, we have a rare window to act. Make a tax-deductible gift today to help stop feral deer before their impacts become irreversible. Your support will power on-ground campaigners working with decision makers, farmers, and conservation groups to drive national pressure and secure change.
Management of feral deer remains inconsistent across Australia. While some states treat deer as pests, others continue to afford them legal protection, limiting effective control. National coordination has improved, including the National Feral Deer Action Plan, but implementation and funding remain ad hoc and lack the stability and long-term consistency to get the job done.
Targeted, professional control – including aerial shooting – is the most effective and humane way to reduce deer populations at scale, especially when applied early and consistently.
But success depends on sustained investment, strong policy settings and coordinated national action. Right now, those pieces aren’t in place at the scale required.
Without it, feral deer will continue to spread – wrecking landscapes, degrading waterways and driving mounting pressure on wildlife, agriculture and communities.
There is still an opportunity to slow their spread and reduce their impact, but it requires coordinated national action.
Feral deer are tearing through bushland, stripping native plants, trampling fragile soils and degrading waterways. Left unchecked, their populations can double within just a few years.
Hooved invaders on the move – feral deer are spreading fast, trampling landscapes, wrecking native habitats and turning up in suburban streets. Left unchecked, they’re set to become one of the country’s worst environmental disasters.
It is estimated that there are over 1 million deer occupying nearly 40% of Victoria. Projections indicate that, without significant management intervention, the population could escalate to between 1.7 and 4.6 million by 2050.
The federal government has released a National Feral Deer Action Plan, and public submissions for the plan are now open. Please use this form to make a submission today.
Our protected areas are being trashed, trampled, choked and polluted by an onslaught of invaders. Invasive species are already the overwhelming driver of our animal extinction rate, and are expected to cause 75 of the next 100 extinctions.
But you can help to turn this around and create a wildlife revival in Australia.
From numbats to night parrots, a tax-deductible donation today can help defend our wildlife against the threat of invasive weeds, predators, and diseases.
As the only national advocacy environment group dedicated to stopping this mega threat, your gift will make a big difference.
A silent crisis is unfolding across Australia. Every year, billions of native animals are hunted and killed by cats and foxes. Fire ants continue to spread and threaten human health. And the deadly strain of bird flu looms on the horizon. Your donation today will be used to put the invasive species threat in the media, make invasive species a government priority, ensure governments take rapid action to protect nature and our remarkable native wildlife from invasives-led extinction, death and destruction.
If you are having trouble submitting a form, please read this guide.
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Dear Project Team,
[YOUR PERSONALISED MESSAGE WILL APPEAR HERE.]
I support the amendment to the Kosciuszko National Park Wild Horse Heritage Management Plan to allow our incredible National Parks staff to use aerial shooting as one method to rapidly reduce feral horse numbers. I want to see feral horse numbers urgently reduced in order to save the national park and our native wildlife that live there.
The current approach is not solving the problem. Feral horse numbers have rapidly increased in Kosciuszko National Park to around 18,000, a 30% jump in just the past 2 years. With the population so high, thousands of feral horses need to be removed annually to reduce numbers and stop our National Park becoming a horse paddock. Aerial shooting, undertaken humanely and safely by professionals using standard protocols, is the only way this can happen.
The government’s own management plan for feral horses states that ‘if undertaken in accordance with best practice, aerial shooting can have the lowest negative animal welfare impacts of all lethal control methods’.
This humane and effective practice is already used across Australia to manage hundreds of thousands of feral animals like horses, deer, pigs, and goats.
Trapping and rehoming of feral horses has been used in Kosciuszko National Park for well over a decade but has consistently failed to reduce the population, has delayed meaningful action and is expensive. There are too many feral horses in the Alps and not enough demand for rehoming for it to be relied upon for the reduction of the population.
Fertility control as a management tool is only effective for a small, geographically isolated, and accessible population of feral horses where the management outcome sought is to maintain the population at its current size. It is not a viable option to reduce the large and growing feral horse population in the vast and rugged terrain of Kosciuszko National Park.
Feral horses are trashing and trampling our sensitive alpine ecosystems and streams, causing the decline and extinction of native animals. The federal government’s Threatened Species Scientific Committee has stated that feral horses ‘may be the crucial factor that causes final extinction’ for 12 alpine species.
I recognise the sad reality that urgent and humane measures are necessary to urgently remove the horses or they will destroy the Snowies and the native wildlife that call the mountains home. I support a healthy national park where native species like the Corroboree Frog and Mountain Pygmy Possum can thrive.
Dear Project Team,
[YOUR PERSONALISED MESSAGE WILL APPEAR HERE.]
I support the amendment to the Kosciuszko National Park Wild Horse Heritage Management Plan to allow our incredible National Parks staff to use aerial shooting as one method to rapidly reduce feral horse numbers. I want to see feral horse numbers urgently reduced in order to save the national park and our native wildlife that live there.
The current approach is not solving the problem. Feral horse numbers have rapidly increased in Kosciuszko National Park to around 18,000, a 30% jump in just the past 2 years. With the population so high, thousands of feral horses need to be removed annually to reduce numbers and stop our National Park becoming a horse paddock. Aerial shooting, undertaken humanely and safely by professionals using standard protocols, is the only way this can happen.
The government’s own management plan for feral horses states that ‘if undertaken in accordance with best practice, aerial shooting can have the lowest negative animal welfare impacts of all lethal control methods’.
This humane and effective practice is already used across Australia to manage hundreds of thousands of feral animals like horses, deer, pigs, and goats.
Trapping and rehoming of feral horses has been used in Kosciuszko National Park for well over a decade but has consistently failed to reduce the population, has delayed meaningful action and is expensive. There are too many feral horses in the Alps and not enough demand for rehoming for it to be relied upon for the reduction of the population.
Fertility control as a management tool is only effective for a small, geographically isolated, and accessible population of feral horses where the management outcome sought is to maintain the population at its current size. It is not a viable option to reduce the large and growing feral horse population in the vast and rugged terrain of Kosciuszko National Park.
Feral horses are trashing and trampling our sensitive alpine ecosystems and streams, causing the decline and extinction of native animals. The federal government’s Threatened Species Scientific Committee has stated that feral horses ‘may be the crucial factor that causes final extinction’ for 12 alpine species.
I recognise the sad reality that urgent and humane measures are necessary to urgently remove the horses or they will destroy the Snowies and the native wildlife that call the mountains home. I support a healthy national park where native species like the Corroboree Frog and Mountain Pygmy Possum can thrive.
