Feral deer spread toward Australian cities despite five-year national action plan

A leaked government report card on Australia's feral deer gives every state and territory a failing or floundering grade except one. South Australia drew green in all four assessed categories after launching a statewide eradication plan in 2022; the national bill for the animals exceeds 91 million dollars a year in production loss and management time. The assessment covers the five years of the national feral deer action plan, 2020 to 2025, and finds numbers and territory both still growing.

Six species are established — chital, fallow, hog, red, rusa and sambar — with the densest populations across the south-east and outlying colonies in South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. The advance on the cities is no longer theoretical: the report records two men fined after deer spooked them during nude sunbathing, leaving them lost in the bush. "This is what sustained failure to act sufficiently results in," said Euan Ritchie, a professor at Deakin University and president of the Australian Mammal Society.

The traffic-light table has a shape. The jurisdictions that chose to manage their deer — to keep numbers down indefinitely, at recurring public expense — drew red: New South Wales and Tasmania in all four categories, Queensland and the ACT three reds and a yellow. South Australia, the one that chose to be finished with them, is the one that measurably reduced their abundance, distribution and impacts, with high confidence. "Deer are the next feral pig," said Reece Pianta, advocacy manager of the Invasive Species Council, which obtained the report — pigs being the invasive Australia has spent decades failing to contain. Pianta allows that deer "probably can't be eradicated" from the continent; the South Australian marks show what aiming to end a problem achieves that aiming to administer one never does.

Victoria is where the friction sits in law rather than ecology. Deer there are still classified as wildlife rather than pests, and the report has renewed calls to change that. Wildlife, in practice, is a managed resource with a constituency; a pest is a target. The 91-million-dollar annual bill lands on farmers, drivers and native vegetation, while the animals themselves remain, for the hunting interest, capital on the hoof.

South Australia, the only state that promised to be done with its deer rather than keep paying for them, is the only one with green marks to show for five years.