NPWS Is Deaf to International Expertise

Hawaii is proving that volunteer hunters are an effective and often essential tool in conservation management, and a paper published by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature shows how feral pigs are being removed with the help of hunters.

The NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service is continuing to ignore solid research and evidence from overseas, instead carrying on with its own mismanagement of wildlife and the land.

Hawaii established a feral pig eradication program using voluntary hunters with dogs in designated areas and, unsurprisingly, found “this method successfully removed a large percentage” of the pigs.

In one test area containing 26 pigs, hunters removed all but three. The results also found that hunting with dogs was “particularly effective for pigs that are shy of other removal techniques”.

“The use of volunteer hunters with dogs has produced positive results,” the researchers concluded, going on to say the thing that Conservation Hunters have repeatedly tried to get through the deaf ears of the NPWS: “Feral pig populations continue to threaten conservation areas … so having multiple control techniques will increase the efficiency of our ungulate control programmes.”

NPWS, which has shunned discussion with Conservation Hunters, should also pay attention to other findings by our Hawaiian friends.

“Good communication and strong relationships between conservation programmes and the hunting community are fundamental to the preservation of biological resources and the restoration work that the agencies are trying to accomplish,” the researchers said.

“We have thus been able to gain knowledge from their expertise.”

The NSW NPWS is currently deciding on how it will tackle feral species up to 2015. If it genuinely wants to do the best it can, it must immediately embrace the valuable and demonstrated contributions that licensed, voluntary Conservation Hunters can make.

Source: "The use of volunteer hunting as a control method for feral pig populations on O’ahu, Hawai’I" by MD Burt, C Miller and D Souza. This paper was presented at the IUCN International Conference on Island Invasives.