#9
Post
by Dennis La Varenne » Sun May 30, 2004 3:38 am
Ricko and Dad,
I have been watching this privatization of public hunting for many years and I do not have any sympathy for it. Privatized hunting always degenerates into rich-only hunting. Whereas, keeping in the public domain never excludes it from the wealthy. Deer are legally Game Wildlife under Victorian law and are the property of the people and must remain so.
Private landholders should not be allowed any proprietorial interest in Wildlife. They do not and cannot husband them as they do livestock and if they have a clearly demonstratable problem with them as a pest animal, then they can apply for a pest destruction permit.
Hog Deer particularly are not very big grazers, nor are they really numerous enough to compete with sheep and cattle (except in very bad drought perhaps) and they eat a wider variety of forage (see Mayze and Moore, 1986) than sheep and cattle, so I do not believe there is direct competition.
There are as many farmers who like having them around as don't and it has little to do with loss of feed for domestic livestock. I don't accept that they are a general agricultural problem, but it is useful propaganda if you are pushing the barrow of privatized hunting.
Victoria is the only State at present where there is general access on much public land for hunting. However, if it ever closes off because of the planning of the dark greens who run Parks Victoria, then the common hunter will have lost a traditional heritage forever.
The average wage earner hunter will be almost completely excluded from hunting by the big spenders from overseas because of the economic rationalism of farmers understandably wanting to make money from pest animals.
Hog Deer are classified as Wildlife under the Victorian Wildlife Act 1970 and therefore are protected as such for the time being. But Parks Victoria has a deer management policy of eradicating or controlling non-indigenous wildlife on any lands under its control. The are completely unwilling to entertain the idea of conserving any deer on their lands. Like the farmers, they see deer as competing with natives for habitat. Natives, therefore, have the only priority.
Parks Victoria also have an inbuilt anitpathy toward any form of hunting except by professional cullers hired by it. They are quite prepared to accept the by-kill of natives if poisoning gets rid of non-natives as Ricko mentions in the Barmah and on Wilson's Prom.
I was involved in many campaigns to have Hog Deer hunting allowed on the Prom at suitable times of the year and in areas less frequented by visitors but Parks would not tolerate the idea despite their not being able to produce a single shred of evidence that there would be any kind of adverse ecological impact on the Prom from deer hunting. They just hate the idea and that is that.
They will even look you square in the eye and flat deny that they poison Hog deer on the Prom.
However, if private lands become less available to hunting through the imposition of fees by farmers, I believe that poaching will definitely increase - not decrease as the article says. Historically, where the common people became shut off from their hunting heritage, they resorted to poaching.
It is not as simple as the CAMPFIRE projects in Africa suggest. The CAMPFIRE system returns money to the traditional tribal owners of an area who formerly were the hunters of that area. Until CAMPFIRE, these people poached on their own tribal lands. It is not quite the same as Australian farmers making money from a pest animal.
Much of the poaching over there is for biltong or bushmeat. When the old colonial governments controlled these territories, they instigated game laws which effectively excluded the native peoples from their traditional hunting lands. Those people then resorted to hunting their own tribal lands contrary to colonial law - which is still called poaching.
The same happened in Europe and in England after the Norman conquest in 1066 when traditional hunting rights were taken from the common people. Up until then, any Anglo-Saxon could hunt. It was a birthright. The Normans ended it and a strong poaching tradition developed (a la the Robin Hood legend) and continues to the present day in Europe as well as England.
When hunting rights were taken from the Anglo-Saxon people, many of them starved because they were in fact big meat eaters in those days contrary to what is now believed, and meat from hunting was a significant part of their diet.
After the French Revolution in the late 1700s for instance, one of the very first rights demanded by the common people was the restoration of their hunting rights which had been taken from them by the aristocracy (read wealthy in these times).
This is one of the reasons that I see considerable dangers in the privatization of hunting in this country. Hunting will degenerate in to trophy shooting by the wealthy.
Personally, I will not support the move into this kind of hunting.
Hunting is the traditional right of all the people, not just the well off. Having it as such does not mean unrestricted access either. Hunting must always be consequent upon ecological sustainability, and we support its continuance through our taxes and licences - not trophy fees by another name.
The problem with the privatization of hunting is that this coin has two sides. When there is a profit to be made, the animals are conserved and when the market declines, they are just as readily gotten rid of for something more profitable. Their intrinsic worth as a specie of wildlife is reduced to that of livestock. That is not a very reliable prospect and does not guarantee the future viability of a specie once it is commodified.
Gamefarms in Australia are notorious for their rate of failure and they become more and more dependent upon attracting wealthy overseas shooters to defray their own operating costs to the exclusion of locals and that is a problem more likely than not to result in poaching.
The argument offered by the ADA president in the article that having legal hunters in an area prevents poaching is debatable.
Most of the year there is no hunting because privatized hunting is entirely about shooting trophies. Most of the year this does not happen and the hunters are not there. Farmers are left to husband an animal which is not bringing an income for most of the time and most of which will never bring an income because they are not trophy quality whereas all of his sheep and cattle are marketable for meat, hides, wool or breeding for most of their lives.
My opinion is that privatized hunting is being increasingly promoted at the expense of fighting for the continuation of public hunting on public lands. Its promotition is almost an admission that all is lost. Our main battle is to get rid of the entrenched position within Parks Victoria that all non-indigenous animals, especially deer, are bad and to stop them killing them off.
Hunting should be the right of all the people, and for all the people (with apologies to Abraham).
Anyway, those are my thoughts on the subject.
Dennis La Varenne
Dennis La Varénne
Have the courage to argue your beliefs with conviction, but the humility to accept that you may be wrong.
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