Good to see some chat on this. ‘Enforcement’ on Victorian wetlands is functionally non-existent. DPI, through Game Victoria, now administers duck hunting. Compliance Officers number five. On opening and closing weekends, they are supplemented by police, DSE and Parks Victoria staff. That’s it.
Re protests starting because of the shooting of threatened species. CADS was formed 27 years ago as a result of the cruelty of duck shooting. No one was defending the birds or auditing bad behaviour so Laurie Levy took out the first team into the field.
Duck rescuers don’t protest. They don’t carry placards or sign petitions or march in the streets. There’s no time. They’re too busy saving injured ducks, getting them to vets and released back into the wild. For this, they are charged with concocted offences such as ‘harassing and hindering hunters’, with fines imposed for even more improbable ‘crimes’ such as blowing a whistle.
In contrast, not one hunter has been charged with offences under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1979. Not this year, last year or in living memory. Even when they failed to kill wounded ducks, placed live ducks into bags or hung living ducks from their belts. (And were filmed doing so.)
Nor have hunters been charged with stuffing bags full of dead ducks into logs so they don’t have to be added to their daily bag limit. Or discarding the carcasses of thousands of ducks like so much rubbish on the wetlands. Some are ‘harvested’ of one small bit of breast meat; the rest is thrown away, to become food for foxes or feral cats.
You have to wonder since when was a swan, kite or coot legal game? It’s not just at Box Flat that these birds are gunned down. It’s everywhere. No one is monitoring them and shooters know it. If you’re interested, here’s some photos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/94330342@N04/
Oh! And yes, I got a gun licence and shot all those freckled ducks to bring shooters into disrepute. Because they’re not doing a good enough job of it themselves, are they?
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