An ID test is all well and good but what happens in practice? I recall
seeing a report from a person who went to a duck shooting spot as part
of the protest action. Basically they reported that lots of things are
shot and only the legal bag limit is kept, that is once they have their
bag they keep blasting away and don't collect what they shoot. They
also reported that the hunters fired there shotguns in the air so that
the pellets would rain down on the protesters and were accussed by the
hunters of being paid to protest. There were also other reports on
birding-aus of all the other species that were shot like magpies or
anything else flying past. Doesn't sound like the laws are well enforced.
The problem is there were way too many cowboys. I regularly go to a
country property and prior to the gun laws coming in we used to have
people driving by spot lighting regularly and on many occasions firing
into the property, against the law but doesn't help you much if collect
a bullet. We regularly needed to alert them that there were people on
the property. Then of course there's the famous story exposed on media
watch, where someone form the gun lobby was spring supplying a picture
of a deer with the caption "don't shoot Bambi" to the local paper and
the same picture appeared in a shooting magazine with the caption here's
bambi before I blew it away. The story was submitted to the local paper
in a successful attempt to prevent NPWS carrying out a major cull after
the 2001 Roayl NP fires when the deer were out in the open. Presumably
the motive to keep deer in the park so they could hunt them. As you can
tell I don't thnk much of these cowboys.
Chris Ross
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