POISONING THE DEER.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 118, 21 May 1928, Page 6

POISONING THE DEER.

Once upon a time no praise was too high for New Zealand's red deer herds and the noble heads of antlers they produced for the joy of sportsmen from tho ends of tho earth. Famous Nimrods from the British Isles used to declare that nothing so fine as this country's stags were ever raised in the glens of Ecclemacfechan or the corries of Sporranmuir. They expended large sums of money on kits and arms of precision and firstclass steamer passages, and they also paid a pound or two for license fees here, telling the authorities at the same tune that they would have had to pay five hundred times that amount in Scotland. Deer were regarded as national assets in those days, and a "royal" head was a treasure beside which sportsmen stood for their photos with feelings of great, swelling pride. Nowadays it seems there is nothing too bad for that same noble stag. He a national nuisance, say the farmers; he is ruining the bush, say the foresters. The deer haters wax absolutely ferocious. The latest idea is poisoning them as if they were so many rabbits or rats. The recipe is quite diabolically ingenious. "Salt licks,' by which one presumes rocksalt is intended, are to be placed in the Wairarapa forests and elsewhere. When the deer get accustomed to the thoughtful provision someone is going to substitute arsenic for the original article, or sprinkle arsenic on the lumps of rocksalt. One would like very much to know what the world's sportsmen will say about playing such a lowdown game on the deer. They will ask, haply, if New Zealand's riflemen are such poor shots that they have given up all hope of killing the animals in the ordinary way. Certainly it is a very curious instance of the reversal of official attitude on game and game laws.

Coincidentally with this poison-'em-off campaign there comes a wealthy Welshman's praise of deer and deer-stalking sport in the south, round about the Haast Pass, at the head of Lake Wanaka. It may be that the authorities save the cost of arsenic yet if they would proclaim the fact that New Zealand has the finest deer heads in the world going begging, free to all comers, and ammunition thrown in. —TANGIWAI.