Pies are a Trojan horse of sorts for Louise Daily.
“A pie is one of the most approachable things for most Australians. It’s an iconic part of the diet,” she said.
It is what is in the pies that Ms Daily and her business partners want to normalise — meat harvested from culling programs.
“More often than not, most of the meat doesn’t get utilised and we see there’s a huge waste of really amazing protein that we want people to be able to enjoy more,” she said.
Eating pests
Louise Daily hopes to expand operations interstate. (ABC Goulburn Murray: Alice Walker)
Wildpie launched in Beechworth in north-east Victoria in August, working with venison and goat from local control programs, boar from South Australia, and wallaby harvested from a culling program on Flinders Island.
Ms Daily says the business aims to raise awareness around the importance of controlling invasive species — excepting the wallaby — and to actively contribute to reducing populations.
“Really our main mission is just to make game meat more approachable to people,” she said.
“We hope that we can grow and people will be supportive of what we’re doing and we can help create an industry.”
Louise Daily says consumers are becoming more conscious about the source of their food. (ABC Goulburn Murray: Alice Walker)
It is a topical conversation.
On January 7, ABC TV premieres Eat The Invaders, a series based around the artist and “First Lady of MONA” Kirscha Kaechele’s 2019 cookbook and exhibition Eat the Problem.
Another cookbook, Ross O’Meara’s Wild Meat, hit bookshops this year and is selling well in popular Victorian hunting destination Mansfield, according to the local bookshop.
It is not the meat from recreational hunting that most concerns the Invasive Species Council, but the thought of a culinary industry built around feral animals.
“It does highlight the issue of invasive species … and it also can build a bit of that social licence for control,” conservation officer Tiana Pirtle said.
“But the objectives of a commercial market is to self-perpetuate and keep generating revenue, and at a certain point those [ecological and economic goals] are going to conflict with each other.”
In other words, Dr Pirtle said if your conservation goal is to eradicate or tightly control an invasive species, then eventually the population is going to fall to a point where it undermines the market.
Tiana Pirtle says culled animals left to rot in the landscape should not necessarily be seen as waste. (Supplied: Invasive Species Council)
“We need landscape-scale, targeted, coordinated approaches that are specifically focused on removing, eradicating, reducing invasive species populations,” she said.
“We still don’t really have a compelling example of a commercial market around eating an invasive species out of the landscape that really works, and sometimes it actually causes more harm than good.”
NZ’s deer wars
The tipping point between commercial and conservation interests has been investigated in New Zealand, which Wildpie points to as an example of successfully building an industry around invasive species management.
But that picture is complicated, according to the New Zealand Game Animal Council.
Wildpie’s business partner and supplier operates a boning room in the same building. (ABC Goulburn Murray: Alice Walker)
The hunting statutory body’s 2023 report for the NZ Department of Conservation acknowledged programs to recover harvested deer for the meat market were not “efficient at maintaining very low deer densities as population density influences their financial viability”.
General manager Tim Gale said meat harvesting strategies could be successful in reducing populations of certain species in certain areas, particularly in open country where aerial shooting was more effective.
“If you’re aiming for eradication, commercial avenues are probably not the way to go,” he said.
“But it is another really valuable tool in the toolbox.”
Tim Gale would like to see more commercial harvesting of species introduced to New Zealand. (Supplied: Tim Gale)
He said introduced species like deer, tahr, chamois and pigs had value in New Zealand as a hunting target for meat, social activity and tourist dollars.
But commercial ventures have been seen to conflict with the interests of recreational hunters.
“In New Zealand we created things called recreational hunting areas … where people felt these deer species were under threat,” Mr Gale said.
“That meant that no helicopters could fly in there to shoot and recover deer.”
In the mid to late 20th century, private commercial hunters in New Zealand shot large numbers of deer for the venison market before reduced demand and increased costs favoured the more profitable model of deer farming.
At its peak in 1971, Mr Gale said 140,000 deer were harvested in New Zealand by commercial hunters.
Since 1983 he put the annual figure at 20,000.
‘Pie in the sky’
University of Auckland professor of conservation biology James Russell said commercial meat harvesting was no longer a key plank of biodiversity policy in New Zealand.
Professor James Russell says building a meat market around invasive species seems appealing but becomes problematic. (Supplied: James Russell)
“Anything could collapse that market very quickly … so there’s that risk to the resilience of your pest control regime if you are at the vicissitude of market forces,” he said.
“That doesn’t mean that … we shouldn’t still use the culling operations for biodiversity management and reuse the meat from that, but it shouldn’t be the driving force of it.
“Our national parks shouldn’t really be run as farms for introduced species.”
Feral deer populations are most concentrated in south-eastern Australia. (Supplied: Faye Beswick, Invasive Species Council)
Like Dr Pirtle, he said the devil was in the detail and business interests did not support eliminating their product — the meat source.
“That is problematic at any level because for an introduced species … the goal should be to remove it completely,” he said.
The Invasive Species Council said deer had doubled their range in Australia since 2002 and were now found in every state and territory, trampling and overgrazing vegetation.
The federal government puts numbers between 1-2 million, up from 50,000 in 1980.
Louise Daily wants to challenge negative preconceptions about game meat’s flavour, cost and safety. (ABC Goulburn Murray: Alice Walker)
Ms Daily said her business would not make much of a difference to deer populations, but she would be happy if it did.
“We’re not going to put ourselves out of business,” she said.
“It’s a bit of a pie-in-the-sky-type of situation.”
