Feral deer numbers in the ACT are on the rise and the Australian Deer Association wants to work with the ACT government and landowners to control the growing population.
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However, the government isn't interested in managing feral deer, including red, sambar and fallow species, in the territory despite recent surveys indicating numbers were growing.
Australian Deer Association ACT president Peter DeGraaff said his group had been trying to get permission from ACT rural residents to help deal with feral deer since 2010.
He said it was not the aim of the association to eradicate all feral deer but rather to improve wild deer for the purpose of hunting and sponsoring research into their habits and relationship with the environment.
"We want to work with landholders to help them in pest management and in our branch we have a number of agreements with landholders outside the ACT where we go there and we work with them, with appropriate permissions, to control feral animal species on their properties," Mr DeGraaff said.
"This includes deer, rabbit, hares, foxes, goats and pigs mainly, so those are the sorts of arrangements we aspire to within the ACT."
Mr DeGraaff said members of the association worked for free and all had appropriate licences for their firearms and to hunt in NSW.
"I'm a paddock to a plate sort of hunter," he said.
"I don't shoot every deer that I see ... it's about finding a deer that's suitable to take the meat from."
The ADA has a memorandum of understanding with the government to assist in controlling the wild deer population in Victoria and Mr DeGraaff said he would like a similar arrangement in the ACT.
ACT Rural Landholders' Association president Tom Allen said he didn't think there were enough deer in the ACT to warrant bringing in the association.
But he said the ACT government still needed to work to ensure the eradication of feral deer in Canberra's parkland.
"We don't want them counted and mapped, we just want them shot," Mr Allen said.
"We want them taken out and they are a good use of a food source."
RSPCA ACT chief executive Tammy Ven Dange said she was completely against all recreational hunting in the territory.
"I would expect the ACT government to handle feral populations of deer where they don't turn it into a sport. They handle it in a very humane way," she said.
A Territory and Municipal Services spokesman said hunting was not allowed in ACT parks and a wide range of monitoring and control methods were already in place.
