The Labor government had conducted a Parliamentary Inquiry into recreational native bird hunting and the Select Committee handed down its findings in August 2023.
The key recommendation of the Inquiry was to ban native bird hunting on all public and private land from 2024.
Alongside other wildlife supporters, we were confident that the Labor government would accept the recommendations from its own Parliamentary Inquiry and ban duck hunting once and for all.
We were devastated in January when the Labor government announced its decision to allow for the continuation of this cruel and unnecessary “sport”.
But this won’t stop us from fighting for the protection of our native species and for an end to duck and quail hunting in Victoria.
Wildlife Victoria will once again be deploying veterinary triage units into Victorian wetlands during the opening week of the 2024 duck shooting season. Wildlife Victoria’s role in field is to provide veterinary care for injured waterbirds and to collect and document veterinary evidence of shooter cruelty and misconduct.
During last year’s opening week, Wildlife Victoria’s veterinary team assessed 73 individual waterbirds left injured or deceased in field by hunters – eight of these were identified as threatened species and six were non-game species. These figures highlight shooters’ inability or unwillingness to identify species and demonstrates the inherent risk this poses to the survival of native bird species.
All evidence collected during our in-field operations are shared with the regulatory bodies for duck hunting in Victoria and key government stakeholders.