New Zealand has a long history of putting animals in the wrong places. Rabbits, hares, possums, deer and goats are weren't easy to establish but, they're making up for it now.
We've all spent the time trying to remove a few, to keep the numbers down so they don't 'get away on us'. Of the more than 160,000 New Zealanders who hunt each year, most don't fill the freezer outside of the roar or take a rifle out of the cabinet but for sighting in. At the same time, farmers spend about $6 a hectare controlling pests, and the median farm loses around $10,000 a year in production to the pests they can't control. Across the country, that's around $466 million a year inside the farm gate.
There are hunters who'd happily harvest them and are skilled to do so, and processors who'd happily buy the meat. What's been missing is the bit in the middle. Who's allowed on which land. Whether poison went out next door. Which form goes with which carcass. Who pays, and when.
That's us. Think of Happy Ending as the paperwork end of the hunt.
How it works
Landholders sign up their property in a few minutes. We make the map of exactly where hunting can happen, and let them decide who's allowed on. Harvesting problem animals costs them nothing.
Hunters request permission to land, ask to book the days and log what they get in the app when they connect and go. Every large carcass gets a tag. The small animals get a docket for the box. The app writes the MPI paperwork from what they've logged.
Processors receive safe supply with the compliance done, and can see what's on its way in from the field. Everything is turned into human or pet food based on the capability of the hunter and the conditions on the land.
Why all the rules?
Wild meat that ends up in a food chain, for people or for pets, is covered by the Animal Products Act 1999. The rules basically assume that everyone uses toxin and in order to harvest, we need to prove that we don't. While using toxins have massive implications to our farmed stock so mostly, landowners aren't using it, it has an outsized effect on how we harvest. Safety is key so we make sure the rules protect us all.
The reason we exist is to make this transparent, easy to comply and scaleable so we can remove the problems without clipboards, the phone calls and all the goodwill. So we built the rules into the tools. Doing it properly is now the easy way, giving us more time on the land doing the work because its hard to remove pests with a pencil.
Who's behind it
We've spent years building pest traps for rats, stoats, mink, mongoose and squirrels. Over these decades working conservation, $3B has been spent killing pests, and all of this has been thrown away. We'd rather see an animal harvested and used than left where it fell, because the protein we import to fill the gap is nowhere near as good as a World Heritage Forest raised deer.
Next up: what happens when a landholder signs up.
Leave Earth Better.