We're all sick of the duck shooting argument aren't we? Year after year we see the same old television footage — a misty lake at the crack of dawn, tough men with beards and John Deere caps living out their Rambo fantasies on one side, and crusty-looking agitators with beards and hemp trousers on the other; one small group of extremists versus another.
This would all be fine except that in reality the people opposing duck hunting aren't the radicals that the media would have us believe. The people opposed to duck hunting are you and me and most of the people you know — in fact, according to a 2007 Roy Morgan poll, it's 87 per cent of Victorians, a figure spread fairly evenly among supporters of all political parties.
Putting aside for a moment the arguments of cruelty and conservation, it seems simply like a bad political move for the Victorian government to announce that the duck hunting season in 2010 will not only be longer than in 2009, but the daily bag limit will increase from three to eight.
Queensland, New South Wales and Western Australia Labor governments have all banned recreational duck shooting, so there is a precedent to ban this activity on both animal welfare and environmental grounds. With less than 20,000 duck shooters registered in Victoria, why does the Victorian government pander to the shooting lobby at the expense of the vast majority?
Along with expected scenes of the limp and pathetic bodies of swans and freckled duck being laid out on the steps of Parliament House, we can also anticipate the same old argument from shooters — a bizarre and counter-intuitive claim that they are actually the most passionate of conservationists.
Their argument goes something like this — 'We rely on high duck populations in order to shoot them out of the skies for our own pleasure, hence we actually care the most about preserving their numbers'. They claim, maybe truthfully, to do some good work funding wetland conservation. But any such positive contribution is more than outweighed by the harm they cause.
There is also the old chestnut about hunters 'controlling' duck numbers. One could assume that without their important knowledge of 'game management' we would be dangerously overrun by out-of-control duck populations. When a family of mountain duck has moved into your garage, don't say you weren't warned!
You can only feel sorry for Professor Richard Kingsford,