birding-aus
Dear All
In my humble opinion, it is very hard to justify duck shooting through
providing money to protect and maintain habitat. We can do that without
killing the objects we are protecting, and as civilised people that is what
we should be doing. You could as well argue that it is OK to hunt anything
at all provided you pay to keep the habitat in good condition. And whatever
your argument, the eventual problem is that encouragement brings more and
more people into the game, putting more and more pressure on the species
hunted and in the long run there are too many people to allow these forms
of "sport" to continue.
However, whatever your opinion on the merits or otherwise of killing wild
birds or animals for "sport", what is totally unacceptable is the method
of killing used.
Shooting with a scatter of shot results in a hideous amount of injuries and
is very cruel method of killing. If it was a question of a guy (or a girl)
with a gun firing a single shot it would not be so bad, but to blast off a
mass of small shot in the direction of a flock of birds is the height of
cruelty as well as stupidity. The shot does not differentiate between
protected species and game species - as others have so graphically
described.
I have never understood why the RSPCA or other animal protection bodies do
not protest strongly against this barbaric behaviour, but then of course
they turn a blind eye to factory farming, live-animal transport overseas
and other forms of animal "harvesting" where profit is concerned - although
to explain this I recall that in England in the old days, most of the RSPCA
board were country gentlemen who owned acres and happily hunted fox or
deer, and shot grouse and pheasants by the hundreds at weekends (just look
at the Royal Family).
I don't object to deer shooting when controlled as one has to keep deer
from destroying habitat and one has to do something about ferals, and wish
they had shot out all the deer in the Royal National Park (Sydney for those
non-New South Welsh people) when they had the opportunity immediately after
the 1994 fires.
Is there any hope for mankind? A true civilisation still seems a million
miles away.
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