PDF | E-mail

Shooting Ducks in 2011

The upcoming 2011 duck crippling season

Stakeholders? What stakeholders?

Every year at about this time, the clumsily misnamed Duck and Quail Stakeholder Reference Panel begins its deliberations about the possibilities of the following year's duck shooting season. Why call it "misnamed"? Because the major stakeholders in the duck and quail season have no representation on the panel. Namely the ducks and quails. The panel is a collection of hunting and conservation groups. I represent the Conservation Council of SA on the panel.

The terms of reference of the panel make no mention of the pain and suffering of the birds but restrict discussion to the sustainability of the sport. The only valid question for this panel is: For each species of duck, if you allow them to be shot next year, will there be enough for shooters to kill, wound and cripple in the future? Whether shooters or conservationists give a damn about cruelty is moot ... Minister Paul Caica and his Departmental functionaries call the shots with this committee and they don't give a damn what people do to ducks, as long as they can keep on doing it. Feral animals get a kinder death than Caica allows for ducks.

Sustainability is a useful concept, but not the full measure of what it takes to ensure civilised decision making. Dog fighting is sustainable ... as is bull baiting and cock fighting. If your moral universe knows nothing beyond sustainability, then it is a small and empty space.

Misleading the South Australian Parliament

Why are our native ducks given so little protection? A major problem is ignorance and misinformation. Our politicians are sadly ill-informed on the issue and part of the problem is that the laws forbidding people misleading the Parliament evidently don't apply to duck shooters.

Consider this statement made by self confessed duck shooter Terry Stephens, a Liberal Member of the Upper House in Parliament on the 18th November 2009. Stephens was reading and endorsing the words of one Matthew Godson:

If on the rare occasion a duck falls wounded I would always quickly collect and dispatch it. The retrieval usually takes only a matter of seconds.

Misleading Parliament should be a serious business, but Terry Stephens did exactly this by endorsing this implication that wounding of ducks is rare and that, in any event, wounded ducks are killed quickly. This is just one of a string of misleading statements by Stephens in that speech, we can't deal with them all, but lets make a start.

Peppering the Parliament with fabrications is easy, proving the truth is far harder.

In Victoria between 1957 and 1973 Government wildlife researchers caught and x-rayed over 45,000 ducks in a massive study. They were looking for embedded pellets that are an indication that a duck has been wounded. Why did they go to so much trouble if wounding is rare? Because it isn't and there is significant body of research from all over the planet on the topic.

Grey Teal weigh about 500 grams and are the smallest of our ducks. Researchers found 9 percent of the Grey Teal they sampled had pellets embedded in their tiny bodies.

1. Think about this carefully. This isn't 9 percent of ducks shot at. This is 9 percent of the sample captured. Many in the sample won't even have been shot at.
2. Think again. If you hit a duck with a single pellet which ruptures an internal organ and the duck flies off to die after some hours or days of pain, will you see this duck in an x-ray study? No.
3. Think yet one more time. If a duck is hit by a pellet which rips through its body and comes out the other side (more than likely), and the duck is lucky enough to survive, will you see this in an embedded pellet study? No.

Embedded pellet studies only reveal part of the horror of the aftermath of a duck shoot.

But getting back to the data ... it doesn't take many pellets to kill a grey teal. The fact that any survive a wounding is amazing. Larger ducks take more pellets to kill, so you would expect more injuries and more recoveries ... which is exactly what scientists find. The largest ducks surveyed were Mountain Ducks and about 20 percent of these ducks had embedded pellets. Again, I stress, that these ducks are only the survivors, the tip of the wounding ice-berg.

It isn't just in Victoria and decades ago that people wound ducks. It happens everywhere and at all times that people shoot flying birds with shotguns. Everywhere, wounded ducks number in the thousands or tens of thousands annually. A 2006 study in Greenland on Eider ducks found 22 percent had embedded pellets from having been wounded and estimate 30,000 new woundings annually. These are quite large ducks so the figure is entirely consistent with the Victorian data. A study in 1992 in the US found 15 and 9 percent of two species of ducks with embedded pellets. In a study in Canada over a decade between 1989 and 1998, researchers found 25 percent of ducks carried evidence of surviving an encounter with the likes of Terry Stephens.

It beggars belief that anybody would stand up in Parliament and seriously assert that wounding ducks was "rare". Clearly you are allowed to mislead Parliament if you and your mates carry big enough guns.

A duck's bill is 5-10% of its profile area, so injuries like this are common

Photo Left: Courtesy the Advertiser, Photo Right: Geoff Russell

Liars or just stupid? Proving the unprovable ...

So is The Hon. Terry Stephens a compulsive liar or just willfully ignorant? Did he deliberately mislead the SA Parliament? I have no idea, but there is some scientific research on shooters that suggests that, on average, they are either compulsive liars or suffer serious cognitive impairment.

During the 1980s researchers in Canada observed 2,297 duck and geese shooters from hidden observation points. They counted the number of ducks and geese which were clearly downed but not retrieved. They then interviewed the shooters and asked them how many ducks they downed. These birds have a name in hunting research ... cripples. A cripple is a bird that is downed but not retrieved. The chart at left shows that researchers counted between 2 and 4 times more cripples than the shooters owned up to. The big shaded bars are what the researchers saw ... and the small black bars are what the shooters fessed up. Like I said, liars or seriously cognitively challenged ... perhaps a few too many lead shot have passed between their thin cold lips and have addled their brains. Sarcasm aside, there is evidence that people eating birds shot with lead pellets, (which older hunters grew up with), will exceed WHO lead intake guidelines.

Please note that in this blog I'm breaking one of my fundamental rules on campaigning to end duck shooting ... never call shooters cruel and stupid.  However, I haven't maligned them without evidence.

The reason for this rule is simple. If you suggest that shooters wound ducks because they are cruel and stupid, then Governments will suggest controls, training and codes of practice. This is the way Governments try to compromise ... suggest something that will have absolutely no impact but will enable the campaigners (like me) to claim a small victory and which the other side (the shooters) can use for public relations purposes. Governments call this win-win ... everybody is happy ... except the ones paying the highest price ... the ducks.

When it comes to duck shooting with shotguns, this won't work because there are no measures which can either stop wounding or make it rare, because none will have the slightest influence over the laws of physics and it is these which cause woundings. Shotguns wound because of how they operate. There are always holes in the cluster of pellets and it is simply impossible to guarantee that enough pellets will hit the duck to kill it.

Do duck shooters understand their weapons?  More than a few don't. I've met some who didn't understand what pellet patterns look like. I've met some who thought that if the duck doesn't fall out of the sky when you shoot at it, you must have missed. Is it possible to wound a duck without knowing? Not only is it possible, it will happen frequently. A duck hit by too few pellets with none hitting the vital organs or big bones will fly on. Will it give any indication of having been shot? Not if it can help it.

Lies, damned lies and South Australian politicians

Terry Stephens didn't only mislead Parliament about wounding rates. He mislead the Parliament also about the possibility of an effective ban on duck shooting. Referring to the bans on open season shooting in WA, NSW, and QLD, here's what Stephens said (again, the words are somebody else's, but they carry Stephen's endorsement):

Ducks are still shot in these states as pests under destruction permit arrangements. In New South Wales for example many more ducks are now shot and poisoned under pest permits than were previously harvested by hunters for food during past regulated open seasons.

Note that Stephens isn't just saying ducks are still shot in NSW but that many more are shot. I guess he believes that if you must lie, make it a whopper.

Now here's the truth. In 1988 the NSW Animal Welfare Advisory Committee recommended that duck shooting should be banned. At that time, around 236,000 ducks were killed each year for recreation. Recreational shooting was banned in 1995. Compare this figure of 236,000 with ducks killed as pest control in NSW (information supplied by the Department of Environment and Conservation NSW):

Year	95/96	96/97	97/98	99/00	00/01	01/02	02/03	03/04	04/05
Ducks killed under pest permit	81,676	109,821	52,515	45,591	49,224	88,497	35,590	12,906	25,136

As you can see, never, ever have more ducks been shot under pest permits than were shot under the recreational open season ... let alone many more. And, of course, the ducks shot for damage mitigation purposes over rice fields were always in addition to those shot during the recreational open season. Stephens mislead Parliament with a whopper.

The table shows an evident reduction in the number of ducks killed as pests, despite some ups and downs. Why is this? Firstly, when there is no water, people don't plant rice crops. Secondly, rice farmers have been very successful in developing ways to grow rice using less water in recent years. Instead of flooding the crop, they apply smaller amounts at very precise times. Less flooded rice fields attract fewer ducks.

But was Stephen's speech just another piece of verbal garbage delivered to a half empty Parliamentary chamber and promptly forgotten? No. In the run up to the last State Election, at least two politicians picked up and repeated Stephen's whopper.

Whopper peddlers include Vini Ciccarello and Duncan McFetridge. Both wrote to electors during the 2010 election campaigns claiming that the duck shooting ban was unsuccessful in NSW and used almost the precise words Stephens used in Parliament.

The Norwood Duck Swing

Ciccarello lost her seat of Norwood. She was swept away by one of the few politicians who came out openly against duck shooting before the March Election. Animal Liberation door knocked heavily in Norwood with postcards which people filled in calling for a ban on duck shooting. The response from people when you explaining why you were knocking on their door was amazing. A typical response was: They don't still shoot ducks do they? How barbaric. It was carefully explained that the Liberal's Stephen Marshall openly opposed duck shooting and had been promised electoral oblivion by shooter representatives, while Vini Ciccarello publicly supported the ALP policy that allows people to kill and (necessarily) cripple ducks for fun or food.

The electors of Norwood delivered Stephen Marshall a swing of over 9 percent. We can't know how much of it was the duck swing, but we know that people understand this issue. It is simple. It doesn't even need the wounding research. The issue doesn't have the complexity of global warming or the global financial crisis. Some things are just wrong and many people hate duck shooters and will not vote for anybody who is too gutless to openly oppose it. Ciccarello was heavily tainted by her adherence to the party line. Her attempts to use Terry Stephen's whopper in a mailout to people from whom she received ban duck shooting post cards backfired because we responded with a mailout of the truth. Ciccarello's stench only worsened while Marshall glowed with compassion in comparison.

Steven Marshall is a new politician. He tells me that the shooter who visited him after his public statement opposing duck shooting gave him serious concern. He thought his days as a politician would be over before they started because he had got this powerful group offside. But he stuck to his principles and learned a valuable lesson. Never ever believe anything a duck shooter tells you without checking.  They have been bullying politicians for decades with their claims of electoral clout. In reality, they are just bullies who dress up in jungle fatigues to shoot 500 grams ducks with big guns.