Six hunters from the Wellington branch of the New Zealand Deerstalkers Association have donated close to 100 kilograms of wild venison to food banks across the region, enough for more than 700 meals, in what organisers say is the first time a Deerstalkers branch has given meat through the Game Changer programme.
The deer were shot on public land, dropped at a butchery and turned into mince before being split between six charities in Wellington, the Hutt Valley and Kāpiti, among them several Salvation Army branches and the Wellington City Mission. The meat was processed by Cameron Harrison, a Wellington butchery that has worked with the scheme.
Wayne Langford, who founded and chairs the Wild Game Recovery Trust that runs Game Changer, told RNZ the donation was worth far more than its weight suggested.
“That’s just over 700 meals, a significant amount. The good thing about it though is the quality of the meals, wild venison is extremely high in protein, it’s some of the best mince you can get,” he said.
“Often food banks are stuck having to hand out cans of beans and pasta, so adding some protein into the mix is amazing.”
Langford is a Golden Bay dairy farmer who led Federated Farmers as national president for three years until Colin Hurst took over the role. He also helped set up Meat the Need, the charity that channels farmer-donated mince and milk into food banks. Game Changer applies the same idea to animals that nobody farms and that the Department of Conservation would rather see fewer of.
That overlap between charity and pest control is what has pushed the idea along this year. New Zealand has no native land mammals other than bats, and the red, sika, fallow and rusa deer running through the back country are all introduced. Numbers have climbed back towards levels last seen in the 1950s, and browsing animals are steadily stripping the understorey out of native forests. Every animal taken off a hill is one less mouth chewing through seedlings, and until recently most of the meat that was not eaten by the hunter’s own household simply went to waste.
The barrier has rarely been willingness. It has been paperwork and money. Meat given away outside the commercial system does not arrive with the traceability that a supermarket chain or a food bank manager expects, and the butchery bill for turning a carcass into labelled, frozen packs has to be paid by somebody.
In May the New Zealand Game Animal Council and the Wild Game Recovery Trust launched a free online platform called Hunt and Share to deal with the first half of that problem. It gives organisers a guidebook, asks hunters to pass a short food safety knowledge check, records each donated animal in a database and produces labels so a package of mince can be traced back to the animal it came from.
“Wild game meat is a huge asset to New Zealand. Recreationally harvested game meat can be donated, but it does not automatically come with the record keeping and traceability that apply in the commercial meat supply system,” Game Animal Council chief executive Corina Jordan said in the launch announcement.
Langford said the trust handles the rest. “We work with hunters, butchers and foodbanks to organise donations, while also raising the funding to help cover processing costs,” he said. “That means hunters can head out hunting and donate an animal knowing the processing cost is covered, and the meat will be appreciated and utilised.”
He said the record keeping is not optional. “Hunters must complete a short knowledge check and log each animal they intend to donate through Hunt and Share, which provides full traceability from hill to plate.”
The demand at the other end is not in doubt. The Salvation Army’s food security manager Sonya Cameron said meat is what people ask for and what charities struggle most to supply.
“Meat is the number one request from whānau using our foodbanks, and also the most expensive item for us to provide,” she said, using the Māori word for extended family. The council said one in three households had experienced food insecurity in the past year.
Hunting and Fishing Minister James Meager said the platform made an existing habit easier to act on. “New Zealand hunters have a strong tradition of putting food on the table, and this initiative makes it easier for that generosity to reach those who need it most,” he said.
Wellington is not the only place where this is happening. On the West Coast a scheme called Game to Give, which pulls together hunters, conservation groups, community organisations and local businesses, collected 401 kilograms of wild venison mince over two months and put it through regional food banks, working out at roughly 882 meals. In June the Department of Conservation reported that a managed hunt had sent 192 kilograms of venison to a Blenheim food bank while thinning deer numbers on conservation land.
The Wellington donation followed the Deerstalkers annual conference in the capital, and Langford said more hunters signed up to the programme off the back of it. Recreational hunting is one of the more widely held pastimes in the country, so the pool of potential donors is large, and one animal delivers a lot of mince.
None of this replaces a food system that works. A hundred kilograms of mince spread across six charities in a region of half a million people is a week of dinners, not a solution to household hardship, and the trust is candid that it depends on donated time, discounted butchery and grant money that has to be raised again each year. But it is an unusually neat piece of problem solving. A pest that costs the conservation budget millions is being turned into high quality protein for households that cannot afford it, using labour that was already heading up the hill anyway.
Have you hunted for a food bank, or received wild venison through one? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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