General News
25 January, 2023
Lobby group pushes duck ban
DUCK hunting retains overwhelming support across the Loddon as campaigners launch a fresh bid to have the 2023 season cancelled. An exclusive Loddon Herald poll conducted this month had 83 per cent of respondents backing the annual season. The poll...
DUCK hunting retains overwhelming support across the Loddon as campaigners launch a fresh bid to have the 2023 season cancelled.
An exclusive Loddon Herald poll conducted this month had 83 per cent of respondents backing the annual season.
The poll was conducted over three days on the newspaper’s Facebook page and received a total of 123 votes from readers.
Regional Victorians Opposed to Duck Shooting wants the 2023 native duck and quail shoots “cancelled based on alarming continued declines in the bird populations, lack of breeding despite two consecutive La Ninas, and significant adverse impacts of hunting on protected species and regional communities not yet adequately investigated by the hunting regulator”.
In a submission to Victorian Game Management Authority, the group claimed examples of those impacts and that tables obtained through Freedom of Information showed thousands of threatened species had been killed as collateral damage.
The group said there were also tourism operator concerns for customer safety and economic loss, landowners’ fears for their families, of trespass and the risk of spread of foot and mouth disease.
“The 40th annual aerial survey, one of the largest wildlife surveys in the country and the only objective long-term dataset, has again shown game duck populations are declining, in some cases by an order of magnitude. Ninety-six per cent of bird breeding was observed in ibis, pelican and egrets - not game ducks.
“No government authority has been able to provide an estimate of the number of public waterways open to shooters or confirm whether it is closer to 8000 or 20,000. Unlike outdoor shooting ranges, the vast majority of duck shooting areas are neither signposted as shooting areas, nor monitored by any authorities. No health or safety risk assessments have ever been conducted for nearby residents or other recreational users, other than at two wetlands in Mildura in 2019 which were subsequently closed to shooting for safety reasons.
“Closing the 2023 shooting season is the only sensible and appropriate way to allow the birds a chance to recover and the regulator a chance to conduct overdue due diligence of social or economic impacts to community and that includes impacts to mental health”.
Last year’s season ran for three months after hunters were effectively blocked from shooting across the Loddon and Victoria by COVID lockdowns in 2021. In recent years, most duck hunting in Loddon has been on private property, shooters say.