Right: protesters against duck shooting line the steps of the Victorian Parliament in early 2010.
Further implications
The 2011 duck season will be watched with interest by hunters and animal liberationists and conservationists alike. It will be important to duck hunters that the season precedes uneventfully and that there are no notable accidents, including the shooting of endangered species. Any such occurrences are likely to be used by protest groups to demonstrate their case that duck hunting is both barbaric and environmentally damaging.
The extent of duck population sizes has also been disputed among experts. Thus follow up studies of duck numbers will be important to determine the extent of the recovery of duck populations and the extent to which they have been negatively impacted upon by a return of the Victorian duck hunting season to a full twelve weeks.
The sampling procedures that are used to determine the extent of duck numbers prior to duck season being decided upon in Victoria have been challenged. This has been in part because much of the sampling is done within South Australia among bird populations some of which do not migrate to Victoria.
It has been suggested that it is not possible to draw reliable conclusions about Victorian waterfowl numbers based on South Australian surveys. This argument is made the more interesting as South Australia has not returned its hunting season to the pre-drought length, arguing that duck populations still need the opportunity to consolidate in the aftermath of thirteen years of drought.
The larger question is going to be whether duck hunting should be allowed to continue in subsequence seasons, presuming we do not immediately experience another drought.
It has been noted that in New South Wales, where duck hunting has been banned some duck species are coming to be considered pests and are being shot be farmers as part of their pest control practices without the safeguards and limitations that are applied to licensed recreational hunters.
This would seem to suggest that a total ban on duck hunting may not be the complete answer. There are those who argue that duck numbers need to be controlled and that recreational hunting is the best means of achieving this. There are others such as RSPCA spokesperson Dr Hugh Wirth who argue that ducks should be taken out of the firing line altogether and that it should cease to be legal to shot them as pests. Dr Wirth claims they do no substantial harm to crops and perform a valuable function eating slugs and insects.