It's although possible to write a telnet script. It's as secure as SNMPv1
I haven't any experiences with perl, but I've succesfully made a telnet connection with bash/netcat at port 23:
nc -w 3 $DEVICE_TO_TELNET 23 ....
or with php (taken from a CISCO router script):
$fp = fsockopen ("$DEVICE_TO_TELNET", 23, &$errno, &$errstr, 30);
fputs ($fp, "$USER\r$PASSWORD\r"

;
fputs ($fp, "[command you would enter in your telnet-session]\n"

;
$buffer=fgets ($fp,128); // If you want to cache the output
fclose($fp);