An independent inquiry has stated that Field and Game Australia should rightly be concerned that serious efforts by Victoria’s Game Management Authority (GMA) are underway to restrict duck hunting in the state, regardless of scientific evidence. The veiled threat about whether duck hunting may no longer continue in Victoria should be taken seriously.

The inquiry’s author, Grahame Webb (PhD, DSc h.c., FRZS), is an internationally respected zoologist who has worked with diverse wildlife species. Webb is known for writing openly and frankly about how wildlife conservation issues become embroiled in conflict, usually for the same reasons – competing factional interests under the ‘conservation umbrella’.

The inquiry was to review the Ministerial Briefing 2021 – Duck Season Recommendations 2021. 

The inquiry was scathing, citing the reduction of the 2021 duck harvest season as excessive and unwarranted. 

The justification masquerades as a science-based decision, when in reality it is a politically expedient decision, aimed at legitimising the views of anti-hunting and animal rights groups, at the expense of hunters. 

Webb goes on to say the rationale appears to be politically based rather than science-based. 

Advice to the Minister from the GMA, and the evidence upon which it is based, has not been logically derived from the available data.

The fundamental legislative responsibility for ensuring conservation and sustainable use of game animals during a legal hunting season has been relegated a low priority, relative to embellishing with the Minister political advantages of favouring an anti-hunting approach. Evidence has been cherry-picked by GMA, to support an anti-hunting ideology, in preference to a science-based sustainable hunting ideology.

This article appeared in The Koondrook and Barham Bridge Newspaper, 27 May 2021.