The rainforests of eastern Victoria are home to giant tree ferns which pre-date the dinosaurs. But entire stands of these ancient plants are being wiped out by an ever-growing threat – deer.
Joe Greet, a plant ecologist at the University of Melbourne, has seen the understory of these once-lush forests transformed.
“They’ll browse [eat] them continually until those tree ferns are exhausted and die,” he says.
Deer impact the environment, farms and personal property, costing Australia an estimated $91.3 million in 2023. Despite this, they remain a protected species under Victorian law. Advocates are calling for an amendment to the state’s Wildlife Act to reflect the reality of Australia’s deer problem.
Victoria, along with Tasmania, protects deer for game hunting, a strategy incongruous with policies elsewhere in Australia which have classified deer as pests, requiring landowners and authorities to control their numbers. South Australia has adopted a policy of eradication.
Deer were first introduced to Australia in the 1800s by acclimatisation societies as a hunting resource and due to a belief they would improve the Australian landscape.
Jack Gough, advocacy director at conservation group the Invasive Species Council, says that this “historical quirk” was driven by a desire to make colonised lands “more European”.
As deer were released, they were protected under law to ensure their populations were firmly established. Gough says decades of inaction led to their numbers increasing “completely out of control.”
Species such as rabbits and foxes were similarly introduced by European colonists to remind them of “home”, but have since been declared pests.
Deer remain an outlier, protected to ensure they remain a hunting resource and prioritising their aesthetic and cultural value rather than their ecological impact.
Peter Jacobs, executive officer of the Victorian Deer Control Community Network (VDCCN), says government policy has not kept up with the severity of the problem.
“Their numbers have exploded,” he says.
“We need to recognise that deer are a pest and that we need to stop protecting them.”
He says the animal’s range now covers nearly 40% of Victoria, with unchecked growth putting their numbers in the hundreds of thousands. The State Government concedes that deer are so numerous in many areas that eradication is no longer an option.
While populations existed in the wild for some time, the number of deer in Australia rapidly grew from the 1980s. Their spread was aided by bushfires and droughts that cleared out forests, creating more low-lying food sources.
These elegant looking animals, so loved in popular culture, film and literature, have been dubbed by federal environment minister Tanya Plibersek as “the next rabbit”, due to an increasing concern that they may spread throughout Australia, transforming ecosystems and threatening agriculture. While present in all states and territories, deer populations are highest in the eastern regions of Victoria and New South Wales.
Pests eating rare plants
According to his research, Joe Greet says there are very few plants deer won’t eat. Their unfussy diet allows them to thrive as they enter new environments.
It’s not only their grazing that harms native flora such as tree ferns. A 2023 study found that browsing by deer on low-lying plants can make the base of a forest drier and more flammable, increasing bushfire risk. Deer feeding on young trees also makes it harder for a forest to recover after it is burnt, Greet says.
The Victorian Wildlife Act 1975 that protects deer has been under review since 2021, but the government is yet to deliver a decision.
Deer populations are still controlled on public land in Victoria, largely by shooting, but only when authorities can prove they are causing environmental or economic damage.
The Victorian Deer Control Strategy, released in 2020, includes on-ground and aerial shooting programs, and the State Government has committed $18.25 million over four years towards the strategy.
Jacobs argues that the bureaucratic hurdle of proving damage, means control isn’t widespread, but targeted only at places where the authorities can show they’re impacting on important assets, allowing deer populations to grow and proliferate in other areas.
While current control measures are often targeted to places with high conservation value, Greet says that even in modest numbers, deer begin to have a noticeable impact on the environment. He says that consistency in management is essential so that areas where deer are not controlled don’t act as a “reservoir” from which the populations can return.
An exception to protection law was introduced in Victoria in 2013, allowing landowners to shoot deer to prevent damage to private property, as is the case with native wildlife such as kangaroos. Jacobs said this optional control of deer on private land is still out of step with other introduced species.
In contrast, Victorian landowners must take reasonable steps to prevent the spread of, and if possible eradicate, pests such as foxes, cats or rabbits.
Jacobs says it is “really bizarre” that deer are not considered pests, and that landowners have no obligation to control them.
“They can, in fact, harbour deer on their property,” he says.
While there is growing pressure to end the animal’s protected status, Sean Kilkenny from the Australian Deer Association (ADA), a hunting advocacy group, says that the current classification is necessary to ensure hunters follow the rules, as the same legislation protecting deer also governs hunting practices.
Kilkenny says protecting deer is about “regulating the hunter, not the animal”. Some fear declaring deer a pest could make hunting an unregulated activity, leading to unsafe practices like hunting at night.
Kilkenny also says the protected status is misleading and does not actually stand in the way of deer control, and that Victoria has “quite effective” deer control programs.
Victoria also has a year-round open season on deer hunting, without restrictions on the number of deer a hunter can take. Kilkenny says this serves as an effective and economical approach to deer management.
“Hunters are a motivated workforce. They harvest deer for free and no government wants to spend money on something they don’t need to.”
A report by the NSW Government suggested that hunting may only have an impact in the most accessible areas.
Kilkenny says the ADA welcomes an expansion in the role of recreational hunters to areas they currently do not have access to.
VDCCN’s Peter Jacobs says despite community concern, reclassifying deer as a pest species will not impact hunting opportunities.
He also says hunting can continue to be regulated under other legislative instruments such as the Firearms Act and Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act.
Cultural ties to introduced species have often hindered government attempts to reduce their impact on the landscape. Efforts to remove horses and cattle from the alpine areas in Victoria and NSW, despite their environmental damage, have faced fierce criticism due to the place of these animals in Australia’s post-colonial cultural identity.
Although Bambi-lovers may not like it, says Jacobs: “deer just don’t belong in any Australian ecosystem”.
This story is co-published with The Citizen, a publication of the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne.
