There are anomalies and quandries with this decision and the emotions still run high when the ideology starts.
However, shedding ideology may be what the debate needs.
With animal cruelty, we all sit somewhere on a very wide spectrum which has contradictions at both ends.
All humans abhor cruelty to some degree and shooters, I am sure, would not want a retriever dog wounded and slowly dispatched after being dragged over suffocating water.
At the same time, duck protestors who eat beef might give no thought to how a percussion bolt (stun gun) is used in an abattoir, despite footage of it being quite galling.
However, there are several other nonparallel spectra, including vermin control, particularly the often forgotten quandary of ducks being culled legally as pests on rice farms.
The gorgeous fox cubs in my garden will one day be shot and will most likely suffer when they are.
Another spectrum includes the chemicals that go into growing grain which kills hundreds of species of invertebrates along the way.
And do vegetarians really think that not one drop of marsupial blood is shed to get lentils into their dal?
Duck shooters are easy targets because the narrative is that they thrill in cruelty, loutishness and vandalism.
What is of interest is that duck hunters have improved their game, and the credit might not be all their own.
I jousted with Regional Victorians Opposed To Duck Shooting (RVOTDS) last year over my obligation to report that the key evidence they provided me of hunter wrongdoing was five years old.
Also, three separate ecology statisticians’ submissions to last year’s inquiry were also scrutinised down to the ink and were found wanting, notably the mathematician who published an embellished graph which its original author had used to justify duck sustainability.
The mathematician only communicated through an intermediary.
The submissions were chosen because they looked qualified and emotive-free.
Which leaves the hunters to bring balance to the debate.
Not only did both hunting organisations and one private hunter I contacted answer and return calls, they were well-spoken, polite, quite smart and above all they deferred to science.
And they give to science.
RVOTDS released a statement last week that criticised ‘eye-watering’ government funds going to the duck shooters at Field and Game Australia (FGA), and the charge sheet listed on RVOTDS’s website damned grants in the order of tens of thousands of dollars.
Among the dozen or so published, $48,134 was granted to install 300 nesting boxes at Connewarre, $40,000 for ecosystem management and $30,000 for weed control at the group’s wetland.
There are many more.
Habitat preservation has always been a trait of hunters because they want their sport to continue, ergo they will need ducks.
They are entitled to funding as per any other sport and with that funding, not a cent goes on a single munition.
They also don’t want a rogue element among their ranks, so they make a point of using peer-group pressure to pull any hotheads in.
They understand both the sustainable harvesting model and the emotive concerns that are raised.
The protestors, meanwhile, don’t seem to see the success they may have had in turning this sport around.
I have no vested interest in this debate, nor have I owned a gun or hunted an animal for anything but pest control.
I return to the garden anything in my house from a huntsman or wasp to drunken guests and I have resurrected enough injured birds on my watch to fill an aviary.
But I fish and I eat meat and I kill vermin so that’s three different spectra for me.
Know thyself.
The hunter’s victory is clear enough.
What protesters I think are failing to see is a victory of sorts accrued from decades of a commendable collective effort of confronting everything from policy to armed men and women chest-deep in remote lagoons.
Andy Wilson writes for Country News. He is a pre-peer review science editor in a range of fields and has a PhD in ecology from the University of Queensland.
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