26 February 2022

Today, the Victorian Government has outlined the arrangements for the game duck hunting season for 2022. Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania are the three Australian states with regimes in place to regulate the game hunting of wild ducks.

Find the arrangements for the 2022 Victorian Duck Season here.

Find the arrangements for the 2022 South Australian Duck Season here. 

Find the arrangements for the 2022 Tasmanian Duck Season here. 

The announcement of these arrangements is historically late, and that has been the cause of unnecessary angst amongst licenced hunters. There is no value in speculating here on the reasons for that delay (although the representatives of hunters do need to examine and understand them properly), the bottom line is that there is no good excuse for the Victorian Government taking so long to act on advice and give certainty to tens of thousands of stakeholders. 

Whilst the core business of the Australian Deer Association is, as our name suggests, deer, our interest naturally extends to other issues that concern the management and hunting of wild game in Australia.

The move towards adaptive harvest management for game waterfowl in Victoria has implications for the management of both that species and all other game wildlife nationwide. It is, in essence, a move away from what has been a primarily subjective and politicised decision-making process towards a more objective, evidence-based process. If the Victorian government manages to get that right, it could serve as an exemplar for game management in Australia in the decades to come.

The exclusion of hardhead ducks from the bag this year, along with the continued exclusion of blue winged shoveler, is cause for concern. The stated rationale, that "both species were recently listed as threatened" is flimsy and is contradictory to the approach of the Victorian Government in managing the sustainable harvest of other species of wildlife on that same list (e.g. Murray Cod, Southern Bluefin Tuna). Whilst hardhead don't feature heavily in hunters bags, they are a prized hunting species and this warrants an explanation greater than the very superficial one that has been given. 

Adaptive Harvest Modelling 

Put simply; Adaptive Harvest is a framework for making objective decisions in the face of incomplete knowledge - like all things in Wildlife Management, it is not an exact science.

The 2022 Victorian duck season arrangements are notable because it is the first time in Australia that adaptive harvest modelling has been used to practically manage game hunting.

Duck hunters will have their own opinions about where the model landed this year. There will undoubtedly be some disappointed with the bag limit. Some will also be unhappy about the the mid-week opening (that being a government management decision and not a feature of the adaptive harvest model) although, that is tempered in 2022 with the fact that it actually adds three days to the season. However, many hunters will be pleased to see a return to full length open seasons, which an adaptive harvest model looks set to reinstate as the rule rather than as the exception.

The Interim Adaptive Harvest Model used, amongst other things, the data from the Eastern Australian Waterbird Survey (EAWS). What is notable about this is, that it puts the matter of the sustainability of the duck season beyond question. In media reports, the RSPCA Victoria CEO Dr Liz Walker is quoted as saying 

“Victorians want to see decisions made on science and evidence. The 2021 Aerial Survey of Waterbirds in Eastern Australia (EAWS) reports that game species abundances were well below long-term averages with six out of eight native game species showing significant long-term declines. Total waterbird abundance is the third lowest in 39 years. In particular, Grey Teal, Australasian Shoveler and Australian Wood Duck numbers have been declining for many years. The Pacific Black Duck, Chestnut Teal, Hardhead and Pink-eared Duck abundances have declined since 2020.” 

Professor Richard Kingsford, who is the lead on the EAWS is also one of the two researchers delivering the Interim Adaptive Harvest Model - it cannot viably be argued that the Victorian Duck Season is unsustainable based on the EAWS when it is being conducted in line with the recommendations of that study's lead researcher, 

This is an interim model, it is planned to develop over the course of years as the theory gets tested in the real world. That means that the model could eventually use different data inputs and deal with them in a different way. What is most important for all stakeholders is that there is transparency about what the inputs are, and about how they translate to outputs. 

We’re not going to tell you what to think or deal in simplistic sloganeering. This is a significant change, and it is nuanced and complex. We urge hunters with a real interest in Game Management to read the material for themselves and make up their own minds.  

Victoria has been inching towards an Adaptive Harvest Model for duck hunting since 2009 when the Victorian government formed an expert panel of scientists from Australia, New Zealand and the USA to formulate a scientific approach to duck season setting in Victoria. The ‘Waterfowl Conservation and Harvest Model’ aimed to place the decision-making process objectively and remove the politics from the current opinion-based decision-making system. Their recommendation was to adopt an Adaptive Harvest Management (AHM) model, similar to what has been used in North America for the past 25 years. Models were provided in the report published in 2010, but none were implemented.
In 2016, the Victorian government committed to progressing an AHM in the Sustainable Hunting Action Plan 2016-2020. As a result, the 2010 report was then reviewed by the Arthur Rylah Institute (ARI) and NSW DPI in 2017. The review recommended a changed approach to the implementation of Adaptive Harvest.
In 2020, a distinct aerial monitoring program was designed and implemented. For the first time, absolute abundance estimates for ducks were modelled, and recommendations were included. Dr Steve McLeod, NSW DPI, reviewed this report.
In response to a 2018 election commitment, an expert panel was formed to review the 2017 report. The expert panel report was completed in 2019. It made a series of findings and recommendations, including “a simple harvest management framework be adopted initially, to clearly translate waterfowl monitoring and data on rainfall/wetland availability into harvest recommendations” while the development of the AHM model is developed simultaneously. In October 2021, we were invited to comment on the interim framework that will lead to the implementation of Adaptive Harvest Management. Cognisant of the importance and implications of this framework, the ADA fully resourced a detailed submission.

RSPCA continues to abandon its commitments and engage in misleading activism

What stood out to us this in the protracted public discussions about this year’s duck season in Victoria was the renewed vigour with which the RSPCA attacked regulated sustainable hunting, both publicly and behind the scenes. The RSPCA has been hawking around some re-heated opinion polling from two years ago in an attempt to scare marginal seat MP’s into abandoning evidence-based management in an election year. From a political standpoint, the polling in question is effectively useless – it demonstrates an unsurprising diversity of views in the broader community about duck hunting, but it fails to quantify the salience and the direction of duck hunting as an issue – in layman’s terms, it has no information about how these casual opinions might translate to votes on polling day. We can only speculate that the RSPCA has not released that information because it does not suit their narrative.

The RSPCA, of course, has an established history of playing fast and loose with the truth when it comes to game hunting. Readers might remember RSPCA CEO Dr. Liz Walker from her bizarre and embarrassing turn, posing in early 2016 with, what was clearly, a long-dead (and one can only assume quite pungent) swan which the RSPCA inferred was killed that morning by recreational duck hunters.

It is simply not conceivable that a veterinarian of Dr. Walker’s experience and standing did not almost immediately know that the story, much like the departed swan, wouldn’t fly.

Later that same year, following a damning internal review into how the RSPCA missed a series of warnings about the appalling treatment of 23 horses at a property in Bulla, on the outskirts of Melbourne, a suitably chastened and contrite Dr Walker fronted the media to take her medicine.

“We certainly understand that over the past few years, there have been issues which we have campaigned on, and their tone and the way we have done that definitely impacted on our trust with our stakeholders, and we apologise for that”.

Dr Walker also acknowledged that the RSPCA’s activism had compromised the vital work of their inspectors.

“it puts them (the inspectors) in an untenable position to have to do that whilst the organisation that employs them has in the past openly and very emotionally and stridently advocated against the existing laws”.

We can only take on face value that Dr. Walker was sincere at the time, her statements certainly took the public pressure off the RSPCA.

The RSPCA has a stated position on recreational hunting:

“The RSPCA opposes recreational hunting due to the inherent and inevitable pain and suffering caused.”

It is flawed, misleading and simplistic, but arguably defendable position with a veneer of scientific basis (albeit somewhat hypocritical given RSPCA’s profiteering from endorsing intensive agriculture practices).

Engaging a market research firm to push poll “attitudes” of Victorians towards native ducks is not objective science – it’s naked activism.

At the ADA, we know very well what activism is – we unashamedly engage in it to prosecute our shared values and drive better outcomes for recreational hunters and wild game management. That means that we know it when we see it.

There are around 100,000 described species of native wildlife in Australia. To focus on the attitudes of the community to less than ten of them is not some happy coincidence, it’s the zealous pursuit of a political agenda.

It would seem that the RSPCA’s entrenched culture has proven far more enduring than Dr. Walker’s pious contrition following those significant failures just five years ago.

The RSPCA is back in the activism game and, if history, and their own internal analysis is anything to go by, their vital role as safeguards of animal welfare will be all the poorer for that.