Building hunters’ knowledge

Tuesday 22 December

Game hunters have excellent baseline knowledge of safety and legal hunting areas and there is some room for improvement in more specialised areas.

Those are key findings from a summary report released today by Victoria’s Game Management authority (GMA) of findings from a recent Hunters’ Knowledge Survey conducted by research company, Australian Survey Research (ASR).

The survey tested hunter knowledge of a wide range of material which can be found in the Game Hunting in Victoria manual.

The results show that game hunters in Victoria generally have excellent knowledge in critical areas such as safety and legal hunting areas and good knowledge of animal welfare considerations (with room for improvement).

Where knowledge tended to drop away sharply was in areas that hunters might be licenced for, but never participate in – for example most holders of a licence endorsed for deer never hunt hog deer and, subsequently, have a low knowledge base overall about the laws pertaining to them.

The modules with the highest proportion of respondents achieving the majority of correct answers were the hound hunting and general hunting modules. Hound hunters may have performed better given they are already required to pass a knowledge test.

This report sets a baseline to measure the effectiveness of education initiatives. Groups with an agenda opposed to game hunting may attempt to use it in other ways, however, it is clear that, whilst there is room for improvements, game hunters in Victoria are generally well versed in critical considerations around safety and legal hunting areas.