In this fourth installment of our History of Hawaiʻi's Deer series, we chronicle the six-decades-long saga of attempts to introduce Axis deer to Hawaiʻi Island, replete with the twists and turns of legislative efforts, court challenges, scientific studies, and multiple gubernatorial interventions, underscoring the complex interplay and tensions of differing natural resource management priorities in Hawaiʻi's modern environmental history.
Buckle up friends!
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In the early summer of 1950, the “Deer Program,” as it was dubbed by the Board of Commissioners of Agriculture and Forestry under the Territory of Hawaiʻi, was introduced as part of a five-year game management plan on Hawaiʻi Island. The plan hoped to establish a small herd of Axis deer as game animals in the inland saddle region between the mountains of Mauna Loa and Maunakea.
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Within days of its preliminary approval by the Board, the little deer program sparked an outsized debate.
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Pan-Pacific Press Bureau, "Mauna Kea, Hawaii Island," 1935, Hawaii State Archives.
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By the second week of June, deer introduction to Hawaiʻi Island was opposed by a growing number of ranchers, farmers, and, namely, the Hawaii Island Planters' Association, the Audubon Society, with the Fish & Game Protection Association leading the charge. The superintendent of the Hawaiʻi National Park, unwilling to risk the looming deer introduction, took the matter up directly with the Department of the Interior.
In response to the controversy, The Honolulu Star-Bulletin ran a seven-part series of articles penned by Colin G. Lennox, President of the Board of Agriculture and Forestry, laying out the history of Hawaiʻi's deer, the merits of the proposed Deer Program, and rebuttals against concerns over another inter-island introduction of the species. In his second article, Lennox covered Molokaʻi and Oʻahu introductions (see our History of Hawaiʻiʻs Deer, Part I and II for more detailed accounts) and in his third, he covered deer damage to agriculture, which he asserted was “negligible,” leaving out their sizable impacts on the pineapple industry of Lānaʻi for 30 years (see our History of Deer, Part III).
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The Honolulu Advertiser countered with an interview (11 Jun 1950, pg. 11) with Fish & Game Protection Assoc. President, Glenn Mitchell, who warned against the tremendous impacts the deer could have on the Hilo watershed area.
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"The deer problem is one for the future," said Mitchell. "The animals will not propagate in great numbers for years, but when they do, there will be no stopping them."
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Taking an entirely different approach, one anonymous botanist launched a series of puns in the Letters From Readers section of the Star-Bulletin, "QUESTION FOR COLIN LENNOX AND THE DEER," one read, "why disturb all that flora for just a little fauna?"
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The Deer Program then touched off a storm of letters in protest of introductions:
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"From all over the Hawaiian islands, and from dozens of places on the mainland as far away as Boston, Mass., and Coral Gables, Fla., came heated letters. Most of them written in protest. The file in the case is thick as a big city telephone directory...'A great error,' said a wood pulp executive who said the deer would destroy the forests. 'A mistake,' said the head of the department of zoology at the University of Arkansas. 'The deer would be a greater curse than the wild goat and sheep,' said a Hawaii rancher...The board took refuge in a storm cellar and forgot the idea." (Zalburg, S., "Hawaii's Axis Deer: Are They Heroes or Villains?" The Honolulu Advertiser, 24 Apr 1955, pg. 13.)
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The rising tension surrounding game animal introduction in Hawaiʻi underscored contradictions in the Board of Agriculture and Forestry's own mandates; firstly, to create forest reserves and protect watersheds; secondly, to support agriculture; thirdly, to manage fish and game.
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For the next five years, the debate over deer introduction to Hawaiʻi Island seemed to have gone dormant, but was certainly not dead.
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After Governor King pocket-vetoed two deer introduction bills in the 1955 legislature, the Division of Fish & Game charged Lyman Nichols, a wildlife biologist, and William Graf, a game specialist, to do a study of the nature of Axis deer and their effect on the agriculture and ecology of Lānaʻi. Three years later they released their report, “Ecology of the Axis Deer,” in which “no serious range damage by deer [had] been found.” As to management of population numbers, the report concluded that “every evidence at hand indicates…that the axis deer can be controlled.”
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Okamura, C., The Honolulu Advertiser, "Experts Counter Big Isle Objections to Axis Deer," 10 May 1963, p. 13.
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With the Nichols-Graf study in hand, two more companion bills were introduced in the 1963 legislative session, seeking to appropriate funds for importing a nucleus herd of 50 Axis deer to Hawaiʻi Island for hunters.
Again, a coalition of opposition formed—this time even more formidable and organized—including the Hawaiʻi Cattlemen's Association, the Farm Bureau Federation, Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association, and the Mauna Kea Soil Conservation District. The bills were killed.
Despite this setback, in 1964, the newly-formed State Board of Land and Natural Resources still approved the transfer, only to face a successful lower court challenge by ranchers and conservationists. The legal battle continued until January of 1968, when the State Supreme Court ruled that the state could indeed bring deer to Hawaiʻi Island from Lānaʻi “if it so chose.”
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What followed was a three-year limbo for a small herd of captured deer on Lānaʻi. In early 1969, after a year of unsuccessful attempts to net them, eleven deer were captured using tranquilizer guns fired from helicopter. The deer were placed in a small holding pen on Lānaʻi while a 300-acre pen was being fenced off at Puʻu Laʻau on Hawaiʻi Island for their release. The Puʻu Laʻau enclosure would allow for a "controlled study," with a final decision on permanent release to come after its findings.
Penned on Lānaʻi for nearly ten months and just weeks before its transfer, the tiny herd was grounded by Governor Burns in response to opposition from the Committee on Preservation of Scientific Areas. The 1970 Legislature, seeking compromise, created the Animal Species Advisory Commission to tackle the increasingly contentious issue.
The prospect of establishing a Hawaiʻi Island herd dimmed in March of 1972, when state officials announced, "The future of Axis deer on the Big Island is a dead issue, at least for the moment." Wild dogs had broken into the holding pens on Lānaʻi and killed the entire herd.
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Even without fresh funding or clear plans of reestablishing another starter herd on the horizon, the debate continued on.
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Reynolds, M. Hawaii Tribune-Herald, 7 May 1972, p. 1.
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In May of that year, in a hearing before the fledgling Animal Species Advisory Commission, the Fish & Game Division presented thousands of signatures supporting deer introduction, while Henry Greenwell, president of Hawaiʻi Cattlemen's Council Inc. (representing over 250 ranchers throughout Hawai'i), and William Paris, president of Hawaiʻi Cattlemen's Association, led the opposition. The testimony—23 speakers against and 13 for—reflected the same fundamental conflict that had begun in 1950: the seemingly irreconcilable interests between game hunters and agricultural and conservation stakeholders.
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For decades afterward, the debate over introducing Axis deer to Hawaiʻi Island appeared to be settled. A combination of legal challenges, environmental concerns, and persistent opposition from agricultural interests had effectively blocked all official attempts. And then, an unofficial one snuck past.
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In February of 2011, a Hawai'i Island rancher reported a large mammal with distinctive spots in her pasture. The sighting mobilized the Big Island Invasive Species Committee, which confirmed, through camera traps, what conservationists and agricultural interests had feared for over six decades—Axis deer had finally reached Hawaiʻi Island.
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West Hawaii Today, 28 May 2011, p. A5.
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Two years prior, three Axis deer had been flown over via helicopter from Maui to Ka'ū as part of an illegal deer-for-sheep swap. Unlike the seesawing of government through the 1950s-70s, the response to this illegal introduction was swift. In June of 2012, state lawmakers specifically banned "the intentional possession or inter-island transportation or release of wild or feral deer."
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At this point in the story, our teeny tiny, pre-Maui-Nui-Venison team gets the phone call to come find and remove the introduced deer. Although our team had years of experience hunting deer at the subsistence level on Molokaʻi, and despite Jake's full-blown Axis obsession that culminated in creating the Axis Deer Institute, none of it was preparation enough for the three year (and ultimately successful) hunt that followed. Equipped with entirely borrowed gear and truck, duct-taped boots on their feet, off they went to find four animals in over 70 square miles of the thick Christmas berry and haole koa bushes of Kaʻū.
Jake's very long 2021 conversation with our friend Peter Attia on his podcast, The Drive, goes into all the details of the adventure (see 00:55:45).
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The immediate response to the introduction of Axis deer to Hawai'i Island thrust our team into an intensive field education—a significant expansion of our understandings of this elusive species and the thoughtful and methodological approaches to management that they have come to inform.
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After the drawn-out affair on Hawaiʻi Island, our History of Hawaiʻi's Deer series will finally get to its last Ke Au Hou installment—the rather inconspicuous Axis deer introductions to Maui that have since spurred a mounting challenge of exponential deer numbers and impacts on the island.
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Pīpī holo kaʻao,
and the tale runs on,
Kuʻulani Muise
Brand Lady & Co-Founder
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