Tasmania’s Wilderness World Heritage Area is under threat from environmentally destructive feral deer. The Tasmanian Government knows deer are invading this global treasure, and must act.
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Right now, feral deer are on the march in Tasmania. Numbering around 100,000 strong, they are spreading into the Wilderness World Heritage Area, putting its globally significant values at risk.
Researchers warn that under current management approaches, Tasmania could be overrun by more than one million feral deer by 2050 — an unimaginable biomass, far exceeding that of any native mammal species.
Fighting to stop the destructive impacts of big invasive animals across Australia is among our top priorities.
We are doing it in Tasmania, where we are campaigning for a strategy that will protect Tasmanian wilderness and farmers from feral deer, and we are doing it in Kosciuszko National Park, where feral horses have been allowed to build up unrestrained.
And Tasmania urgently needs our attention: hard-hoofed feral deer trample precious cushion plants and eat out native vegetation like endangered cider gums. They compete for food and destroy the habitat of small ground-nesting birds and other small animals like pademelons, bettongs, potoroos and quolls.
In February 2022, the Tasmanian Government released its management plan for fallow deer. Although the plan acknowledges that hunting alone cannot reduce feral deer numbers, disappointingly, it continues to protect feral deer for recreational hunters. It is outrageous that to manage feral deer on their own properties, farmers will continue to have to engage hunting groups and seek permits that constrain effective management.
Most disturbingly, the plan sanctions the presence of feral deer in parts of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area along with Ben Lomond and Douglas-Apsley national parks. This is the opposite of what is needed to save these areas.
Whether or not you live in Tasmania, we should all take pride in its wilderness as an area of universal value to humankind. This is why we urgently need your help to allow us to continue to work to ensure Australia hears of the reckless path the Tasmanian Government is pursuing, so we can begin to encourage the state government to change tack.
Please donate today, every dollar will help make a difference.
The Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area was created in 1982 after years of hard-fought campaigning across the country. It is a place that dramatically shaped Australia’s environmental and political history. Almost four decades later the prospect of retaining a highly damaging invasive species in a world heritage area should be a huge concern for all Australians.
In its draft management plan, the Tasmanian Government has listed no conservation goals, no timeframe or targets, no committed funding and no management methods — we cannot expect this exponentially expanding problem to be solved or even curbed without a genuine government commitment.
Earlier this year, with the support of the Bob Brown Foundation, we developed a Tasmanian Feral Deer Strategy that maps out how to protect Tasmania’s high-value natural, cultural and agricultural assets by reducing the deer population to 10,000 by 2032.
Science is on our side. The farming community is on our side. Now, we need to let the key decision-makers and their constituents know that there are viable solutions that are being ignored.
Please be a part of protecting Tasmania’s awe-inspiring World Heritage Area, its unique landscape and its incredible native wildlife.
Please donate today and support our work.
The Invasive Species Council was formed in 2002 to seek stronger laws, policies and programs to protect nature from harmful pests, weeds and diseases.
The Invasive Species Council acknowledges the Traditional Custodians throughout Australia and their connections to land and sea. We pay our respect to their Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.
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.
