Fox hunting featured on ABC TV’s Landline yesterday in a program that looked at the effectiveness of Victoria’s fox bounty and calls by the Shooters and Fishers Party to introduce a similar scheme in NSW.
Featuring the SFP’s Robert Borsak and well known hunter Ron Keihne – maker of Silva fox whistles – Landline showed footage of foxes being hunted and interviewed farmers who backed up the need for shooting as a control method.
It quoted a Live Stock Health and Pest Authority employee, who was laying baits, as saying integrated control programs were the best way to tackle foxes and feral dogs.
However, the Invasive Species Council’s Andrew Cox repeated his claims that bounties don’t work, are subject to fraud and are little more than “rural social welfare”.
Cox continued to push the ISC’s anti-hunting stance, a position that has been criticised by hunting interests as nothing but a defence for the commercial pest control industry.
He claimed the introduction of conservation hunting to national parks in NSW would “divert scarce resources” away from commercial control programs, despite the fact there has been no talk of shifting expenditure away from those programs and putting them into the Game Council, which will manage the hunting.
Robert Borsak said he’d like to see $10 million of the state’s total $52 billion budget spent on a bounty over a 10 year period.
He also backed up the effectiveness of hunting as one of the control methods that can be used against pest animals.
“If you take the conservation hunters who were surveyed and you get their results both on public and private land, there’s over three million feral animals being taken by that group of hunters on private and public land in the last six years,” he said. “I think that’s pretty credible.”
See the full program on the ABC Landline website.
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