Acting Sergeant Graham Perkins is urging hunters to be mindful while participating in a wild goat hunting competition being run by the Department of Conservation and the New Zealand Deerstalkers Association until November 26.

“From our perspective, it’s a great initiative getting people out, and we are working with DOC and the other agencies in this, but it’s also firearm safety,” he said. 

“We want everyone who goes out just to be aware of what they are doing.

“Sometimes people get blinkers on and get tunnel vision about what they are doing, and the safety slips and that’s when we have hunting accidents.”

Graham said it is just a matter of hunters being mindful of themselves and others in their groups.

“With that, we look at the poaching side of it as well. If there are goats on a property, approach the farmer or landowner and seek permission. If he says no, that’s their decision.”

Police would take a dim view of people hunting on land without permission, he said. 

“We will remove firearms and firearms licences, and we will prosecute.

“Approach the landowners, seek permission, and have a good time.”

Graham said police were also still receiving complaints about scams, and he advised people to take extra care and question the legitimacy of any calls they received.

He said a lot of older people were not computer-savvy or Internet-savvy, but it was not only them being caught out.

He recently had a case where an Australian businessman reported a scam that took $40,000 from his New Zealand bank account.

“He received a phone call in Australia while he was on his tractor in the middle of a field and he was three hours away from a computer. The next day, the man rang him back at exactly the right moment and said, ‘this is your bank account’.

“This man was a chartered accountant and he still got duped. He said they were very smart and very cunning and had the right bank account details and the right answers to the questions.”

There were programmes and seminars available to teach digital literacy and what to watch out for, but scammers were getting more and more sophisticated, especially with the rise in Artificial Intelligence making fakes harder to spot.

“If it seems too good to be true, it probably is,” Graham said.