Tasmanian RSPCA tries to re-heat cold duck story from Victoria

Friday 29 January 2021

As we foreshadowed yesterday, the RSPCA Tasmania have come out in the Hobart Mercury today (paywall) with an opinion piece calling for an end to licenced duck hunting in that State. RSPCA Tasmania CEO Jan Davis is the author of the piece and, much like the recent work of her colleagues to the North, her argument is heavy on rhetoric and light on facts.

Ms. Davis attempts to make a bizarre extrapolation from the pass mark on the Waterfowl Identification Test (WIT), claiming that could lead to a large number of protected birds being shot. In doing so, she demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of the WIT, of the vision shown in it and of what hunters must clearly demonstrate before they can pass it.

Bizarrely, Ms. Davis then goes on to repeat the extraordinary misrepresentations of the Victorian Game Management Authority (GMA) Hunters Knowledge Survey, despite a very clear clarification on this having been issued a week ago.

The misrepresentation of this report (either before or after the GMA clarification) can only be seen as a deliberate distortion of the truth.

Ms. Davis’ Victorian Colleagues were a part of a detailed briefing prior to the report’s release in December last year (ADA was a part of the same briefing). As such they must have known that the published report is an abridged version of a full report which will not be made public and that the “questions” contained in the report have been “characterized” from the actual test results. The purpose of the report is to give the reader an understanding of the nature of the questions posed in order to identify areas of relative strength or weakness to the of the level of understanding on subject matters. These limitations and the intent of the report were explicitly called out on its first page and were the subject of considerable conversation at the December briefing.

This re-heat of already discredited lies from the mainland sees Tasmania’s RSPCA take a giant leap towards the failed and dangerous activism route of its Victorian colleagues, let’s hope that they change course before it’s too late.