Dogs and Wallaby Drives in Tasmania

Tasmania markets itself as "Your natural state" to tourists and buyers of produce, and with the eyes of the world on the island during the dramatic rescue of two interred miners at Beaconsfield this year, the irony of this catchphrase has been brought to national attention courtesy of wallaby shooter Todd Russell.

Tasmania, infamous for native forest logging, poisoning of native wildlife with 1080, muttonbirding and appalling roadkill, is also the last legal bastion in Australia of recreational wallaby shooting using hunting dogs to flush out native wildlife. Shooters claim it is their traditional right as a Tasmanian to hunt in this manner and the tradition is believed to have started with the use of dogs for hunting rabbits, but since the introduction of myxomytosis and the subsequent drop of rabbit numbers, the ‘sport’ has transferred its focus to wallabies.

The shooters are usually armed with shotguns (and are not necessarily skilled in their use) and several hunting dogs each. There can be anywhere from 3 to 15 shooters (although permits can be easily obtained to allow for more than 15 shooters) with dogs. The wallaby drive consists of the shooters walking in a line spread over a wide area, dogs barking and hunters yelling, flushing out animals from their daytime nests and shelters. It is important to understand that these dogs are not used as retrievers as in duck shooting, their role is to flush out and, in some cases, kill wallabies, in spite of the Tasmanian Dog Control Act 2000 Section 19 (2) "If a dog attacks an animal … the owner or person in charge of the dog is guilty of an offence."

Hunting wildlife (Bennetts wallabies and Tasmanian pademelons) with dogs can cause extreme distress, severe injuries and death to the marsupials. Moreover, dogs do not discriminate and the hunts are conducted during the day when nocturnal species are resting and the sudden aggressive disturbance causes the wildlife to become disoriented and panicked: quail, native hens and other ground dwelling birds, bettongs, potoroos, Eastern quolls, bandicoots and wombats are driven from their refuges and attacked or killed.

Ground dwelling animals panic and bolt from their hiding places suddenly at great speed. Macropods sustain broken necks and limbs from collisions with fences and in some cases females involuntarily drop pouch young due to stress. Pursued animals may also suffer capture myopathy, a condition of muscle degeneration caused by exertion and muscular stress.

It is common for Wallabies and Kangaroos to escape with severe injuries after being shot or mauled, leaving them to suffer from their injuries, infection, fly strike, starvation or predator attack.

A problem is emerging abandoned hunting dogs banding together in packs. The Tasmanian Parks Service is faced with using 1080 poison to kill the semi-wild dogs living in nature reserves.

It is evident that wallaby populations may need to be managed in farming areas, but appropriate 21^st century management techniques exclude wildlife from the crops by means of fencing, which is far more efficient, and in the long term, a more financially viable option, than the colonial approach of exterminating and persecuting native species to maximize farm productivity or to satisfy some atavistic need for recreation that is predicated on animal cruelty.