Rules-as-code · Plain-English guide
A March 2018 Governor-in-Council Order intended to declare deer unprotected and to set out the firearms permitted to control them. In the encoded ruleset, however, no rules have been written yet — it is currently an empty placeholder.
Nothing is encoded in this ruleset yet
This guide is included for completeness, but there is no logic to explain. The ruleset contains a single empty section labelled “Permitted firearms” and no rules inside it. It reads no inputs, sets no values, and produces no conclusions — so today it has no effect on any application, licence or assessment. The rest of this page records what the Order is meant to cover and what would need to be built.
Every other Governor in Council Order in this project sets a computed fact — typically flipping a species' isProtectedSpecies flag — that the licensing and control rules then read. This one does not. Its entire content is one labelled group with an empty body:
Because nothing is set, a deer is not currently marked unprotected by this ruleset — unlike the possum and dingo Orders, which do flip the flag. Any behaviour a reader might expect from a “deer unprotected” Order is, at present, absent.
From its title and the one section heading it carries, the Order is intended to:
Both of these are described here as intent only. Nothing in the current encoding implements them, and this guide deliberately avoids inventing logic that isn't present.
1 · The species switch is not implemented
To match the sibling Orders, the ruleset would need a guard such as “is the animal a deer?” setting application.wildlife.isProtectedSpecies (and the licence side) to false. There is currently no isDeer field in the shared wildlife model, so this would also need an ontology addition (or a species lookup).
2 · “Permitted firearms” has no encoding
The single section names a concept — permitted firearms — but carries no fields or rules to represent which firearms are allowed, or to check a proposed control method against them.
3 · No area or time limit
As with the other Orders, any geographic scope or expiry the real Order carries is not represented. This would matter once the substantive rules are added.
In short, this entry is a stub awaiting encoding. It is safe in the sense that it does nothing, but it should not be mistaken for an active declaration that deer are unprotected.