NZ Game Animal Council has joined with the Wild Game Recovery Trust to launch Game Changers New Zealand, a platform to help hunters donate meat. Corina Jordan, chief executive of the Game Animal Council, says hunters already donate wild game meat to people in need, but the systems to support that have been patchy.
“This is a massive movement across New Zealand with hunters out there harvesting our beautiful wild protein and then popping that into social distribution channels,” Jordan says.
“This is not a new space.”
At present, hunters who want to donate have to find a food bank or community outlet willing to take the meat. Game Changers now sets up the pathway for that.
“At the moment, what happens is hunters go out there and they’re harvesting these animals and then they’ve got to break them down, they’ve got to find those pathways themselves.
“This cuts out that middleman, and makes the system much tighter and more efficient.
“Hunters can go out and just harvest more animals, then there’s smooth pathways for them to go through.”
Commercial wild meat is regulated by the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI). Donated meat sits outside that, but Game Changers has built a voluntary system to cover it.
“There’s ethics and training for our hunters around what they need to think about when they’re undertaking these processes, and there’s assurance for our donation outfits that the meat they’re getting is safe and it’s traced.
“It identifies where the animals are from, has requirements around identifying that the animal is healthy, and then it traces that from the forest or where it’s been harvested right through to where it ends up on someone’s plate.”
For hunters harvesting to manage populations, the initiative lines up with work they are already doing. Hunters are taking about 350,000 game animals a year nationally. In areas where numbers are above what the environment can carry, that harvest has value beyond the hunt.
“It’s a win for our conservation estate, it’s a win for our primary land uses, because what we have is lower populations of healthier animals that are a good hunting and economic resource, and reducing those impacts on the environment at the same time.”
Hunters volunteer their time and the animal. Donations to Game Changers cover the processing, so there is no cost to the hunter beyond the hunt.
“Hunters are passionate about that, they will hunt anyway.
“If you give them an opportunity for them to do some civic good, some community good, they’ll be in that, so long as it doesn’t cost them anything for the processing,” Jordan says.
“I think that’s where the beauty of this is.”
Since launching, Game Changers has drawn support from the Mataura Food Bank, Auckland City Mission, Wellington City Mission, Coromandel Independent Living Trust and Vinnies Hamilton. Hunters wanting to get involved can find the initiative through the website, https://nzgac.org.nz/hunt-and-share/
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