Deer Oh Deer!

Deer are just those typical animals that wander and frolic through fields of green grass like they have all the time in the world. But sometimes deer can be monsters. Right?

When European settlers came to New Zealand, they found dense or thick bushes. What did they do? Well they cleared the hills for farming and the hills were soon covered with different animals. But deer wasn’t brought in until some wealthy men suggested having deer hunting as a sport. Numbers of deer died on the journey because they were fed carrots, old hay and stale water.

Deer have been roaming around New Zealand for 140 years. For a long period of time deer have been protected until the year 1870. Numbers of deer grew and grew because there was no predators. Because of the great numbers of deer, they made lots of destruction to the plants and fields. The government was concerned so they hired deer cullers to shoot deer.

1870 was the year when hunters could buy a license which allowed them to have a number of stags to hunt down. This lessened the numbers of deer. Some years later, hunters made money by selling skins of deer. Venison wasn’t a big hit then. But even though dead deer were hard to get out of the bushes, hunters tried and tried different methods but it didn’t make a difference.

Then the year 1964 came. That was when helicopters were brought in to lift dead deer out of the bushes. This wasn’t a safe method because there were many deadly accidents. But still hunters didn’t give up. Instead they threw nets down from the helicopters and trapped deer. When prices dropped, the business went down and they could not get any profit from helicopter hunting. So hunting from helicopters were reduced and the population of deer grew and grew.

By:

Liezl