The hunting lobby’s latest argument is that campaigning for safer gun control laws and for humane and effective feral animal control is some form of racial vilification. Their case is that some people identify as shooters and hunters and so calling for tougher laws is an attack on those people’s identity. This, apparently, is racial vilification.
Most sensible Australians know that racial vilification is an ugly thing. While some people may not agree with the call for more stringent gun control laws, and may not accept that amateur hunting is an ineffective way to control feral animals, only the most one-eyed lobbyist would argue this amounts to racial vilification.
Rather than continue an empty debate, it might be more productive to tackle some of the facts regarding amateur hunting and feral pest management. For a decade now a government funded authority called the Game Council has supposedly regulated the access of amateur hunters to state forests to shoot, pierce, stab and gore feral animals. There are now more than 400 forests covering 2 million hectares of public land open for amateur hunters. However, these ten years of amateur hunting have not controlled a single feral pest species in a single forest.
The Game Council itself estimates there are 7.2 million foxes, 23 million pigs, 2.6 million goats and 18 million cats in Australia. Yet in all State forests across NSW in 2011/12, the Game Council says amateur hunters killed just 1,638 foxes, 3,091 pigs, 4,956 goats and 265 cats. They apparently also killed 7,312 rabbits and 90 dogs. These numbers make no meaningful difference to overall feral animal populations which have very high reproductive rates and quickly replace these losses from one season to the next.
Despite these failures the NSW government continues to pump millions of dollars every year into the Game Council. Every cent would be far better spent on targeted feral animal control programs with professional shooters, teamed up where necessary with trapping and baiting, to effectively control feral animals in a given area. Unlike amateur hunting these kinds of program are more than weekend blood-sports, they actually work.
Not only does the Game Council’s amateur hunting program fail to control feral animals, it also fails to ensure safe hunting. With just 4.2 fulltime equivalent staff members to police 16,000 amateur hunters over the whole of NSW, the Game Council is a pretend regulator. The organisation is obviously not serious about regulating safe hunting but is simply a tax-payer funded promoter of a US-style gun and hunting culture.
The emerging gun and hunting culture that has arrived in NSW over the past decade has not been the result of a broad community consensus – it has been through back room political deals struck by successive NSW governments with a few Shooters Party MPs, in order to get their votes to sell off public assets and cut back public services.
In return the Shooters have been given hunting in state forests, funding for cruel blood sports like pig dogging and duck hunting, and they will soon be let loose to shoot in National Parks – a program which a government risk assessment says poses a very high risk of causing injury or death to members of the public and park rangers. The Shooters themselves have done very nicely from these deals with the two current Shooters MPs both former chairmen of the Game Council.
The Greens will continue to campaign for safer gun laws and humane and effective feral animal control in NSW. Our arguments we will be guided by the evidence and facts, not empty rhetoric, and we make no apologies for doing it.