All good stuff coming out here, and I guess the point I was trying to make in my rather long winded post is that heli-hunting in it's two worst forms of spot, drop and shoot, or spot, shoot and retrieve would never decimate our game animals. There just would not be enough hunters willing to come all the way here, pay huge money and shoot animals. After all as I pointed out, even culling from the choppers day after day, week after week, year after year, could not achieve that. Trophy animals were still being taken by hunters all through the heyday of chopper culling.

I myself shot a fifteen year old chamois buck right in the thick of the chopper culling territory in South Westland and the local chopper culler in the same area, shot a huge 24 pointer heavy timbered red stag not 5 km away from the chopper base and in the flyover pathway that the chopper had taken to get to the culling areas for probably 10 or more years.

We have just such huge untapped areas where animals can live for years without ever being seen by choppers so while I wholeheartedly support the concept of keeping hunting 'pure' I'm not alarmed by these sort of developments and feel NZ is unfairly targeted by anti chopper feeling.

9.3x57 has summed it up so nicely.