Community opposition and wounding ignored – duck hunting continues
On Thursday 1 February 2024, the State Government announced another duck hunting season for South Australia. It will begin on Saturday 16 March and end on Sunday 30 June. During those three and a half months, hunters will be allowed to kill/bag ten ducks each, per day – two more than in the 2023 duck hunting season.
Hunters can target seven duck species in 2024 – grey teal, chestnut teal, Pacific black duck, Australian shelduck (mountain duck), maned (wood) duck, pink-eared duck and hardhead. The pink-eared duck and hardhead duck were not permitted species in the 2023 season, and its especially surprising that shooters can target the hardhead in SA in 2024, given that shooters in VIC cannot, because hardheads are listed as threatened under the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act 1988.
The recreational shooting of native duck and quail is unavoidably inhumane.
Every year shooters are caught on camera wounding (not killing) ducks in flight with pellets sprayed from shotguns, and then failing to kill the wounded birds quickly or humanely after they fall from the sky.
The footage has also shown that some shooters do not bother to retrieve wounded birds. Other shooters have been caught killing or wounding protected species and trying to hide the evidence. And some shooters have also been filmed leaving wounded birds accessible to their dogs, even holding the flapping birds up and appearing to encourage their dogs to snap at them.
The RSPCA is not opposed to killing animals for food but is opposed to killing animals by methods that do not guarantee a quick, humane death.
This outdated activity results in widespread suffering due to wounding. As such, it does not meet community expectations in 2024.
In 2023, state governments in SA and Victoria held inquiries into duck hunting
In February 2023, the SA Government announced an inquiry into duck and quail hunting in South Australia. RSPCA SA was among the groups to put in a submission strongly opposed to the hunting of native waterbirds.
The South Australian Select Committee Report
The SA Committee’s final report was released in December 2023. It acknowledged that duck hunting wounds birds and causes unacceptable risks to public safety for non-shooters and that shooters leave too much (shotgun) litter in wetlands.
The report also noted that duck hunting is difficult to police due to the vast areas where it occurs. Despite these acknowledgments, the report recommended this controversial activity be allowed to continue in SA with slightly tightened regulations.
The report included the dissenting statements of two members, including MLC Ian Hunter, who said:
“…..to support duck and quail hunting necessarily means supporting deliberate cruelty to animals which are wounded and left to suffer a slow and agonising death or crippled.
“Duck and quail hunting in South Australia should be made illegal.”
The Victorian Select Committee Report
In August 2023, the Victorian Select Committee released its report, recommending that native duck and quail hunting be banned in Victoria. Animal welfare issues, declining bird numbers and loss of wetland amenities to non-shooters during hunting season were behind the recommendation.
The Victorian report also noted that compliance monitoring was “a near impossible task”. The Vic government ignored the report’s recommendation and declared a 2024 duck hunting season to run from 10th April to 5th June 2024.
Community expectations
Surveys conducted by professional polling companies over the past four years have all found that the majority of South Australians in both metropolitan and regional areas want duck hunting banned. The government’s recent review of SA’s Animal Welfare Act reported that some of the strongest feedback from the community was the desire to ban duck hunting.
Regardless of hunters’ skill, ducks will be wounded with shotguns
When a shotgun is fired into a flock of birds it is common for many birds to be wounded, not killed. That’s because shotgun cartridges, when fired, create a spray of pellets that often miss a bird’s vital organs.
An Australian study (Norman & Powell, 1981) found at least 25% of native ducks shot are wounded (not killed outright). With little formal monitoring of duck and quail hunting activities, accurate statistics are difficult to obtain. Some estimates place the wounding (injury) rate closer to 45%.
Some of the wounded will fly on with pellets embedded and some will fly on and die sometime later from pellet wounds. Wounded birds that don’t drown will likely die from starvation, dehydration, infection, exposure or predation. Many of these deaths will be slow and painful.
For the wounded birds that are retrieved by hunters, recent vision captured from the first day of hunting seasons in both Vic and SA suggests many of these will have their necks twirled (a technique known as “windmilling”) in an effort to break their neck. There is no scientific evidence that “windmilling” is a reliable or humane killing method. After windmilling wounded birds, many shooters will then abandon them without checking for signs of death.
We don’t know how many non-target birds are shot or how many wounded birds are not retrieved
We also don’t know how many shooters will fail to humanely kill the wounded birds that they retrieve.
Due to insufficient monitoring, we do not know how many non-target (including threatened) species are shot by mistake or how many wounded birds are not retrieved. Similarly, the lack of monitoring means we don’t know how many wounded birds will be abandoned by shooters before confirming they are dead.
