Hunting statistics not a bad thing: Bart Irwin

If you’re going to quote statistics around hunting, at least get them right, writes BART IRWIN

A great part of the Territory lifestyle started again recently with the opening of the NT Waterfowl Hunting season on public hunting reserves. Picture: BART IRWIN

• Hunting season a great time of year: Bart Irwin opinion
• Hunters need to keep cleaning up after themselves

Thanks Mr Graham Kirby for reading my column and taking the time to write a letter to the editor. You certainly make some wild assumptions in your letter dated October 1, 2020, and you are good at arithmetic when you multiply the bag limit by the days in the season and the number of hunters in my street.

But if you have studied magpie goose management like I have you would be aware that on average hunters bag 4.5 geese per hunt and hunt four times per season. This is published data in the 2020 Magpie Goose Management Program collected over 30 years by DENR scientists. I’ll let you do the sums of the factual harvest numbers. It falls a lot short of your assumption 21,420 birds for six families.

Of the six families hunting in my street most have just one hunter, a couple two. All properties have at least two mouths and two voters. The others have teenage children that could become hunters, but will certainly become voters.

OTHER BART IRWIN OPINIONS

Idiot hunters shoot up bins designed for their use

Hunting looks to be politicised forever now: Bart Irwin

Private land hunting a great idea, writes BART IRWIN

Hunters don’t hunt every day. Hunters, like fishermen are restricted to a bag limit. Fishers can have a 15 fish per boat limit 365 days of the year. But they don’t go fishing every day.

Apart from me, everyone in my street works full time jobs. Many fish as well, so the hunting pressure would average four days per season. I have already gone hunting four times since the regular season opened on September 23. But alas I was successful just once and bagged six geese and no ducks. That is hunting.

Hunting is a past time. It is something to do at our leisure, not the industrial slaughter you allude to.

And by the way we do hunt ferals. In 2018/19 NT Field and Game members accounted for 6416 feral and pest animals, and thereby won the Field and Game Australia Vermin Control Award for the nation.

You made up plenty of statistics from your assumptions on the success of hunters in the field but provided no numbers of the injured wildlife that were rehabilitated by Wildcare. What happened there Mr Kirby? You seemed to indicate you were part of that organisation.

Mr Kirby why would you dismiss the value of tourist hunter dollars to our economy.

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A study found in 2013 that Victorians spent $439M on hunting annually. The Territory Government calculates that waterfowl hunting is worth between $10M and $25M to the NT economy each year. Queensland University calculates that hunting overall is worth $100M annually to the NT economy. And with all this hunting there are still 1.4 million geese in the sky. I took a trip out on the Arnhem Highway this week and from Humpty Doo to Adelaide River saw thousands upon thousands of magpie geese flying from farm to farm. It was a sight I want to see every year for the rest of my life, because we ensure waterfowl hunting is sustainable.

The NT Field and Game hold clay target practice at the Mickett Creek Shooting Complex range from 4pm every Friday and today from 9am till noon. All are welcome to join in the fun.

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