What the Paddock Knows
There is a conversation about hunting that happens in the city, and a different one that happens past the Great Dividing Range, and the two barely touch.
In the city, hunting is a values question. Out where the work is done, it is a management question, and the people asking it are farmers, land managers, national parks staff and local councils who are trying to protect something from being eaten.
This week I want to make the second case, because it is the one our members live and the one that almost never gets put properly.
The scale of the problem
Australia has an introduced species problem that is difficult to overstate. Feral pigs, foxes, feral cats, wild dogs, goats, deer and rabbits are present across enormous areas of this continent. They damage crops and pasture, they foul water, they spread disease, they destroy habitat and they kill native animals and livestock in numbers most people would find difficult to believe.
This is not a marginal issue. It is one of the principal drivers of native species decline in this country, and it sits alongside habitat loss as a cause of extinction. Every serious land manager in Australia, including every state government and every conservation body, accepts that these populations have to be controlled.
The argument, then, is not about whether. It is about how, by whom, and at what cost.
Nobody in this debate is arguing for leaving feral pigs alone. The question is who does the work.
Where our members come in
Control programs are expensive. Baiting, trapping, aerial operations and contract shooting all cost public money, and there is never enough of it to cover the ground that needs covering.
Licensed hunters represent a large, skilled, self-funded workforce that is already out there. Our members pay for their own equipment, their own fuel, their own time and their own training. They hold licences, they have been police checked, and a great many of them have relationships with individual properties going back years. In conservation hunting programs they operate under supervision, to a plan, with reporting requirements.
That is a genuinely unusual resource, and it is the kind of thing that would be invented at considerable expense if it did not already exist.
(Image: Created with AI)
What the farmer sees
If you want to understand why this matters, the quickest route is to stand in a crop that pigs have been through.
Talk to a producer who has lost lambs to dogs, or watched a season’s work destroyed in a fortnight, and the abstract debate falls away very quickly. These are not people with a philosophical position on hunting. They have a problem, they need help with it, and the person who turns up to help is usually somebody’s member driving three hours on their own time.
That relationship, between hunters and the people who work the land, is one of the strongest things our sport has going for it. It is also, I suspect, the least understood by people who have never needed it.
The obligations that come with it
None of this case survives if we are not scrupulous about how we behave, so let me put the other half plainly.
- Permission, every time. Written where you can get it. Nothing does more damage to every hunter in this state than one person on a property they were not invited onto.
- Clean, humane, appropriate. The right calibre, a shot you are certain of, and the discipline to let one go when you are not. Our case rests on being better at this than the alternative, and that has to be true in the field, not just in a column.
- Follow the program. In conservation hunting, the reporting and the conditions are the point. They are what turns a day out into evidence that the model works.
- Leave it as you found it. Gates, tracks, rubbish, carcasses. Farmers talk to each other, and access is granted on reputation.
- Be careful what you post. A photograph that makes perfect sense to another hunter can look very different on a stranger’s screen. That is not fair, but it is true, and it costs us.
Making the argument
When this comes up, resist the temptation to start with tradition or with rights. Both are real, and neither persuades anyone who is not already persuaded.
Start with the paddock. Start with what happens if nothing is done, because something always is done, and the alternatives are baiting programs and contract shooters funded by the taxpayer. Then explain what a licensed hunter operating under a plan actually contributes to that, at no public cost.
Put that way, it is not a defence of hunting at all. It is a straightforward question about land management, and it is a question our members are already answering, quietly, most weekends, on properties across this state.
Until next week: keep ’em on target, in the field and on the range!
Jai Rowell
President — SSAA NSW
WHAT YOU TELL ME MATTERS MOST – ASK THE PRESIDENT
Every week I hear from members and branches, by phone, by email, and standing around at ranges. If you ask me what the most important part of this job is, that is it. Listening to members. Everything else follows from it.
So, I want to open up another avenue. If you have a burning question about SSAA NSW, your membership, your discipline, or where we are heading, send it through to me at jai.rowell@nsw.ssaa.org.au. Each week I will publish a selection of the questions I receive and answer them here, straight, in this column.
No question is too basic and none of them are off limits. If you are wondering about it, chances are a few thousand other members are wondering the same thing
ABOUT THIS COLUMN
Each week I pull up a seat at the bench to talk about what’s happening across SSAA NSW, the wins, the setbacks, what’s on the political radar, and my thoughts on whatever is front of mind, from the matters members are raising with me to whatever is shaping the sport that week. I’ll put our volunteers where they belong, at the front, because they’re the backbone of everything we do, and I’ll back the industry that keeps our sport strong. The promise is in the name: plain talk, no spin, and I’ll always tell it to you straight.
