TED Crawley and his neighbours are shooting thousands of deer a year with little impact, as hundreds continue to descend onto their paddocks every night.
The Jindabyne, NSW, beef farmer is on a mission to change the perception of deer as a “cute game species” and warned others to root them out before they come entrenched.
Mr Crawley admits 15 years ago, when the deer were rarely seen, “it was a novelty”.
“The kids would all run out the front to see it,” he said.
But fast forward seven years, Mr Crowley and his half a dozen neighbours find themselves dealing with 300 to 500 deer on their property every night.
Vertebrate pests follow an exponential growth curve, so the population grows slowly until it hits a certain threshold, then it…
