Gwion wrote:duncan61 wrote:Yes I watched that before the F1 started.Some say there is too many deer causing problems the deer farmers want the market to themselves.Be interesting to see the outcome
As mentioned above, i have a friend who owns a deer farm and is quite involved with this debate.
No-one in the venison industry has anything against hunters harvesting more wild deer. The issue is quality control and food safety.
If the deer farmers and processors have to adhere (and rightly so) to stringent quality and hygiene standards then any wild harvested meat would have to meet exactly the same standards. This would be very difficult to implement for harvesters and next to impossible to regulate for authorities.
We have discussed this quite a few times and, as my friend points out, while the kangaroo meat industry manages to regulate standards interstate, the logistics due to terrain and habitat for kangaroo is vastly different to that for fallow deer. Also, from an end user point of view, the restaurant trade have to be certain that the meat they purchase has been processed with the highest quality control standards. This would be impossible to guarantee when every Tom, Dick and Harry are trying to flog off whatever they gathered on their weekend hunt.
The venison industry is also quite small. So, is it really fair that some weekend warrior should be able to cut into the hard won market developed by people who have invested heavily in promoting the product as the mainstay of their livelihood?
Imagine how the beef industry would react if anyone could shoot scrub cattle and flog them off to the local butchers or restaurant trade?
A better solution to the overpopulation of deer in Tas is for the season to be changed to a closed season during and leading up to the rut and having an open season for the rest of the year with a vastly increased allowance for hunters to harvest. As in Victoria, as long as you have a license you can harvest as many deer as you can manage. As it stands, in Tas you can only shoot a max of 3 deer a year in a very short season; one with antlers and two without antlers.
As for utilising the harvest from crop protection culls, there is no reason they should not be able to go to the pet food industry.
Not quite right, there are quite a few of us that are licensed to shoot game meat for human consumption in conjunction with a properly licensed abattoir. It has been going on with wallaby as long as I can remember and wallaby are harvested under strict guidelines. Even to sell as pet meat you need to be licensed.Wild harvested Tasmanian wallaby meat has been available for years without complaint.
When it comes to wild harvested venison the only holdup is the current status of deer in the state, there are plenty of opportunities to harvest Deer for consumption and done at the right time of year the meat is good quality and can easily be in the abattoir by dawn. Stags(what most people call male fallow in Tasmania) are really only good for pet food anyway unless you trim fat religiously and avoid the rut but even dogs need to eat.
Using protection of the farmed deer industry as a reason to not allow human consumption of properly harvested and processed venison is very archaic and will only benefit a very few, I find the "wild Tasmanian Venison" label some already use as a bit of a joke. True, the current venison industry is small as once was the Tasmanian wine industry. There are reasons the wine industry didn't flourish until quantity improved, same goes for the venison to trade industry.
I am all for an open year round season on all deer, see where it leads, worse that can happen is we wipe them out in the state, after all they are an introduced pest. It needs to be looked at with an open mind.