Im a kiwi in my late 20s. I spent much of my childhood and teenage years in the mountains and bush (jungles) of New Zealand hunting introduced mammals. I wouldn't have spent so much time in the bush if there weren't these mammals to hunt. I'm not a yee-haw gun toting hillbilly, I'm an educated guy who, as a young man, got so much informal education from being in the mountains trying to stalk in on Deer, Tahr, Pigs (all introduced) that I could take home and eat.

It taught me resourcefulness, physical discipline, patience and survival skills. Having now traveled the world and spent many years living outside of New Zealand I have come to realize what unique abilities these are and in what a unique way us Kiwis have them. My grandfather used to tell me how appreciated us Kiwis were in World War Two for exactly these reasons.

There is nothing special in our water or our climate or anything like that. We just have an incredible resource that many young kiwis have traditionally engaged, often for the purposes of recreational hunting.

There is a chunk of conservation advocates who hardly engage the New Zealand outdoors, like myself (and others), yet they have a say in how it is run. They live in cities and have an idealistic but impractical understanding of our resource. The outdoors and the animals within the outdoors are a concept to these people, not a part of their lives.

Some mammals in New Zealand are an absolute resource and would be easy to control if we saw them as such. We wouldn't need state sponsored poisoning runs or organized culls of NZ's large mammals if youth were shown the educational value of going out and learning how to survive, be safe, be brave, in order to hunt a deer - and then how to not waste it.

I really hope the larger mammals in New Zealand remain and are treated as a resource for NZ's ambitious young people who want adventure but instead find it in playing video games and driving cars fast on public roads.

I see myself as a conservationist, I just don't see the need to wind back the clock 300 years. Lets control the large mammals and protect our unique environment: the two aren't mutually exclusive.