On the hunt

Seeking a direct connection with what they eat, these hunters are turning away from packaged meat to stalk wild animals in Victoria’s forests.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-02/deer-hunters-game-meat/103974062

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A woman sits on the forest floor with a rifle resting on her lap.

On the hunt

Seeking a direct connection with what they eat, these hunters are turning away from packaged meat to stalk wild animals in Victoria’s forests.

By Rhiannon Stevens

Landline
Published 2 Aug 2024, 5:42am

High on Cass Fleming’s bucket list is a desire to find hidden treasure while scuba diving.

She also loves the thrill of a bargain hunt in a country op shop.

So it’s no surprise, she says, to find her one wintry Friday morning on another kind of hunt.

With a rifle slung over her shoulder, she abandons the safety of a gravel track and walks into thick scrub in Victoria’s High Country.

Readers are advised this article contains images some may find distressing.

A woman wearing an orange beanie walks in the forest.

Cass is on the hunt for sambar deer. It’s a long way from her desk in Melbourne where she works in IT.

There are several species of deer in Victoria and sambar is one of the most common. It’s also the largest.

“Sambar deer are regarded as being difficult to hunt, so there’s a sense of having to actually work for it,” Cass says.

As well as her rifle, Cass carries her phone, a paper map and a GPS.

She traces her movements as she heads for a vantage point in the forest.

There is no path and Cass must be able to find her way back to her car.

Cass is on the hunt for sambar deer. ABC News: Rhiannon Stevens

Victoria's High Country is a long way from Cass's job in Melbourne. ABC News: Rhiannon Stevens

Cass has been hunting for less than two years. ABC News: Rhiannon Stevens

After walking for an hour or so, Cass has covered a mere 400 metres.

It’s slow going trying to tread silently over twigs and logs and not alert an animal with far superior senses.

If Cass manages to shoot a deer, she will butcher it on the spot and carry it out of the forest.

This can mean multiple physically demanding trips to her car and back, carrying kilos of meat over streams and up and down gullies.

For Cass, there’s pride in killing her own meat and in the skills she must master to take an animal’s life with an ethical shot.

Cass says she will only pull the trigger when she is confident she can kill the deer in her sights with a single bullet.

“Sometimes people say, ‘Oh, I could never kill an animal’. And they’re meat eaters,” she says.

“And I certainly don’t judge anyone that buys meat from the supermarket, because I do myself as well.”

But when we buy meat, “the reality is you are killing animals but you’re just contracting the kill”, she says.

Cass is part of what some in the hunting community say is a rising trend in people from the cities learning to hunt wild game, driven by an interest in self-sufficiency.

Cass has been hunting for less than two years, but as a long-range rifle shooter she was already familiar with firearms.

“I enjoyed the precision that [long-range shooting] takes and the patience that you need to have to get an accurate shot from quite a distance,” she says.

“Around the same time, I was thinking about the supply chain of food and where our meat comes from.”

When she discovered through friends in her rifle shooting club that Victoria’s forests were riddled with deer, she wanted to learn how to hunt them.

“I like knowing that some of my meat comes from the bush, from an animal that lived a life in paradise,” she says.

“It goes from having that peaceful existence to making its way to my freezer with very little trauma.”

After hours of walking, listening and watching through binoculars, Cass hasn’t seen a deer.

She leaves the forest empty-handed but doesn’t consider it a waste of a day.

“I’ve always loved the bush, so it makes sense to me to spend more time in my favourite place.

“And if I can, at the same time, source some really delicious fresh meat, then that’s a real bonus.”

Cass says there is pride in killing her own meat. ABC News: Rhiannon Stevens

It's slow going trying to tread silently in pursuit of deer. ABC News: Rhiannon Stevens

Sometimes Cass leaves the forest empty-handed. ABC News: Rhiannon Stevens

Cass says while the hunting scene is mostly male — the latest Game Management Authority statistics show only about 5 per cent of people licensed to hunt deer in Victoria are women — she has found it welcoming for a newcomer.

To learn how to hunt wild deer, she joined clubs and signed up for a course at a farm owned by Wally Chiang on Melbourne’s fringe.

A few years ago, Wally’s life took an unusual turn when a midlife reckoning led him to buy 200 hectares of land north-east of Melbourne.

“When I turned 40, I wanted to have a lifestyle where I learnt new things in my life,” he says.

“All my skills are in the IT field. Very virtual skills. Give me a computer and I can do anything.

“Outside of that I don’t know how to feed myself. I don’t know how to cook, I don’t know how to grow my own veggies, and that’s why I thought I’ll learn the best if I throw myself in the deep end.”

Now a permaculture aficionado, Wally — who still lives in the city — has set about transforming his land into a self-sufficient oasis.

It’s a prepper’s dream.

Hunting his own meat is part of Wally’s self-sufficiency plan.

He says he decided to learn to hunt deer rather than learning to fish because it would be a more time-efficient and cost-effective way to get meat.

He’s even calculated how long he believes a family of four could live off the meat of one deer.

“Besides saving money by acquiring your own meat, you also get better-quality meat,” Wally says, adding that in Chinese culture there is a saying that venison is the best meat.

Wally Chiang hosts hunting courses on his farm outside of Melbourne. ABC News: Rhiannon Stevens

Wally Chiang has introduced a variety of animals onto his permaculture farm. ABC News: Rhiannon Stevens

Wally Chiang says he wanted to learn food production skills to become self-sufficient. ABC News: Rhiannon Stevens

Wally also wants his children to grow up knowing where food comes from beyond supermarket shelves. And he finds meaning in the pursuit.

“I guess for me as a male, I would say to be able to provide for your family … when you give things out to your friends and family and say, ‘I shot this deer’, it’s like a story to tell and I think that’s the thing that’s missing in today’s world.”

He admits some in his family raised their eyebrows at the prospect of him killing Bambi — even though they are meat eaters.

When Wally began hunting several years ago, he discovered what he calls a tension between some “old-school hunters” who learnt to hunt from family, and new hunters hungry for information and locations to hunt.

One of the main challenges for new hunters is finding places to hunt, so Wally created a social media page that connects hunters with landowners who have feral animal populations.

Wally Chiang brings hunters together on his farm. ABC News: Rhiannon Stevens

Venison cooking on Wally Chiang's farm. ABC News: Rhiannon Stevens

But there is a minority of hunters who ruin it for the majority, Wally says.

“They just go out there all guns blazing, or they didn’t understand the ethics of hunting or even the etiquette with the farmers — they might leave the gates open, they might throw rubbish around, they might invite their friend without permission.”

To improve hunter unity, provide new hunters with information and opportunities and stop what he calls “the dark side” of illegal shooting, Wally designed a hunting course.

“To teach these people a better way and teach them about nature, teach them about animal behaviour and what tools to use,” he says.

Pulling the trigger, Wally says, is just a tiny part of hunting.

“There’s so many things that’s against us already.

“You’ve got all these activists, you’ve got all the people who want to shut down parks or state forest to not allow people to go utilise the land.

“I think we have to stick together in order for us to progress forward in the new world that we’re in.”

The deer hunting with firearms course Wally hosts is taught by Pete Christian, who has been educating hunters for almost 40 years and runs guided deer hunts.

He says he learnt to hunt as a child in the mountains around Noojee where he was born and still lives.

As a child growing up in a timber town in Victoria’s High Country, hunting was part of everyday life for Pete.

These days he is seeing a change in the types of people learning to hunt.

In his lifetime, Pete says hunting is no longer mostly the pursuit of people in the regions and European migrants who brought with them a strong hunting culture.

“Since COVID a lot of people are coming — young guys with young families.”

He believes the shock of seeing empty supermarket shelves during the pandemic has left an impression.

“[They say] ‘how am I going to feed my family if this happens again?’ So they’ve come to me and learnt how to kill an animal, butcher it, cook it,” Pete says.

“It’s not just the country rednecks. It’s a real wide section of the community.”

Statistics show recreational deer hunting in Victoria is growing in popularity.

According to the Game Management Authority, game licences with an entitlement to hunt deer have risen from around 7,000 in the mid-1990s to nearly 50,000 in 2023.

In comparison, game licences with an entitlement to hunt duck have decreased by 6 per cent to around 22,000 in the same period.

Deer were released in Victoria as game animals in the early years of European settlement.

Estimates of Victoria’s deer population range from several hundred thousand to more than a million animals.

Pete Christian has been teaching deer hunting education courses for decades. ABC News: Rhiannon Stevens

Pete Christian explaining deer behaviour. ABC News: Rhiannon Stevens

Pete Christian says understanding animal behaviour is key to being a successful hunter. ABC News: Rhiannon Stevens

The state government and the Invasive Species Council say deer pose a significant threat to the environment and the agricultural industry.

Yet deer occupy a strange place in Victoria’s landscape and consciousness.

They are simultaneously viewed as a pest — and government money is put aside each year to control them — but they are also a designated game species protected under the Wildlife Act.

There is even a limit on how many hog deer a hunter can kill each season, to preserve their numbers.

And while the Victorian government implemented a program to control deer populations several years ago, the program does not aim to eradicate deer.

Given the size of the state’s deer population, this is not seen as feasible.

Hunters often cite their ability to control invasive pests like deer to sway public opinion in their favour.

But the government says recreational hunting has not been proven effective in controlling deer numbers or limiting range expansion.

“One of the issues with the way that we manage deer in Victoria is that they’re pests but they’re a game animal,” hunter Chris Waters says.

“They’re food but we want to get rid of them. They’re troubling our agriculture industry but they’re an animal that we need to value.

“And so, what do we do with them? Everyone has different opinions and no-one can really agree.”

Chris is a self-made poster boy for Victoria’s new hunters.

As well as hosting a hunting show called The Huntsman on YouTube, he started a hunting club.

And the club is attracting members from a broad cross-section of society, reflecting the diversity of the hunting scene well beyond the stereotypes the public might imagine, he says.

“The modern hunter is actually someone who’s trying to live in the two spheres — they’re trying to live in the city, to have the job, the nine to five, have the partner, the kids, the house, the car,” Chris says.

“But they understand some of the things that are dangerous about that lifestyle and so they’re trying to offset that with some wholesome activities like hunting.”

Chris Waters says hunting is a healthy way to cope with the stress of modern life. Supplied: Chris Waters The Huntsman YouTube

Chris Waters sometimes spends days at a time hunting deer. Supplied: Chris Waters The Huntsman YouTube

Chris Waters says he learnt to hunt deer when he could no longer go spearfishing. Supplied: Chris Waters The Huntsman YouTube

In his garage on the outskirts of Geelong, Chris butchers a leg of deer he killed and stored in his large, packed freezer chest.

Chris says he grew up spearfishing but became interested in hunting when he moved further from the ocean.

He says hunting and eating what he kills aligns with his core values and faith – Chris studied to be a pastor – to live healthily and consciously.

“I can go and buy meat from the supermarket and feed it to my kids, but I have zero knowledge of what’s in there, even if I read the back of it.”

Chris Waters butchering deer. ABC News: Rhiannon Stevens

Chris Waters' family consume venison meat he has hunted. ABC News: Rhiannon Stevens

Chris Waters says for him, hunting is about food, not shooting for fun. ABC News: Rhiannon Stevens

Chris Waters' YouTube show The Huntsman is now in its second season. ABC News: Rhiannon Stevens

The future of Australia’s recreational hunting scene lies in it sourcing wild game meat, he says.

“As the movement towards harvesting and ethically hunting animals as a source of food, but also engaging with them in a respectful way, as that movement gains traction, I think that the preconception of what a hunter is will start to soften.

“For me [hunting has] always been about food. I won’t ever go out and just shoot something for fun.

“But when you overcome the odds and you do manage to do something that’s quite difficult, and then you feel that satisfaction of being able to provide for your family, it’s hard to deny that that feels good.”

Chris Waters says providing his family with some meat he's hunted feels satisfying. ABC News: Rhiannon Stevens

Chris Waters says hunting for meat aligns with his core values. ABC News: Rhiannon Stevens
Credits

Reporting, photography and video: Rhiannon Stevens

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-02/deer-hunters-game-meat/103974062