Shooting, Stalking & Butchery Course

• Firearms safety & range rules
• Types of firearms available and their uses (physical examples available)
• Rifle calibres explained.
• Choosing the correct type of firearm & calibre for you
• Correct fitment of rifle & scope to the hunter
• Possibility to get out on the range

Rifle Skills & Safety

• NZ firearms code
  • The seven basic rules
• Cleaning and maintaining a firearm
• Rifle calibres explained
• Choosing a rifle & scope
• Correct fitment of rifle, scope & hunter

Marksmanship

• Sighting in a rifle
• Shooting positions
  • Bench shooting
  • Prone (lying down)
  • Sitting
  • Standing
  • Kneeling
• Shooting long range
• Truing the rifle and loading
• Possibility of an evening hunt

• Long Range:
  • Use of ballistic apps
  • Dialling/ adjusting up scopes
  • Allowing for windage
  • Truing your rifle and load (used to work out actual ballistics data)

  Ultimate Hunter Course
  The ultimate hunter course is a 3.5 km loop track with 20 realistic, life-size animal targets set out at distances from 50 meters to 450 meters. This course is designed to test your glassing skills as well as your marksmanship.

  Possible evening hunt.

Butchering & Skinning

• Field butchery
• Skinning
• Trophy caping
• ID cuts of meat
• Management of meat in the bush

You don’t need any prior experience to enrol in this course.

To attend OENZ hunting courses, the participant must be 18 years or older, as of the first day of the course. Persons 16 years or older may attend OENZ hunting courses if they are attending with a legal parent or guardian.

We believe that small groups are better for this type of training. So we have a maximum client-to-instructor ratio of just eight clients to one instructor.

Yes, everyone will be offered an opportunity to shoot an animal on the course. The last part of the course is delivered on a large, high-fenced hunting estate. OENZ will supply two animals to demonstrate stalking, shooting, skinning & butchering skills. Additional animals can be shot for a small fee (approx $100 per hind) payable directly to the estate owner. Meat from these animals is divided up at the end of the course.

Hunting on wild public land in New Zealand is extremely rewarding, but it can also be fickle. Recreational hunting pressure, WARO (Wild Animal Recovery Operations) and pest control measures used on public land make it challenging to locate animals within the time constraints of a hunting course.

FAIR CHASE, as defined by the Boone and Crockett Club, is the ethical, sportsmanlike, and lawful pursuit and taking of any free-ranging wild game animal in a manner that does not give the hunter an improper or unfair advantage over the game animals.

“‘Fair Chase’ is the term given to a hunt that takes place on public or private land, either free-range or game estate, where the hunted species can express natural behaviours and has a reasonable and realistic chance of evading the hunter.” Source -NZPHGA (New Zealand Hunting Guides Association).

To deliver our range of hunting courses, we use a mixture of public and private.  By carefully selecting our partners, we can ensure that we offer experiences that align with a “fair chase” hunting experience.

We camp out on the last few nights of this course, but you can hire a tent & all the gear for any of our courses directly from us if you don’t have it. Just let us know before your course what you need, and our instructors will bring it along to the course for you. Other options are to bring along a bivvy bag or fly/tarp shelter to sleep in.

No, we have boot dryers available from the end of day two until we head into the backcountry on day four.

The hunting courses are held in a variety of terrain, from open tussock terrain to dense bush and everything in between. There will be a mixture of off-track and on-track travel throughout the course.