HUNTFEST, GREEN BIGOTRY AND LITTLE SISTERS OF THE INACCURATE DECEPTION

Once upon a time, in a more tolerant universe that now seems so very far away, if an individual didn’t approve of an event, a culture or a business, the way to demonstrate that disapproval was to deny it one’s support and patronage. For instance, if one didn’t like the Catholic faith, one went C-of-E. If one didn’t like Folk or Jazz, one avoided Folk and Jazz festivals, and of course if one objected to gratuitous sex and violence, one avoided watching Parliament Question Time on the tele.

What one certainly did not do was seek to stop the event or practice altogether simply because it offended the individual’s sensibilities in some way. To do so would have been considered profoundly un-Australian. In fact, I think it still is.

Enter The Greens, and suddenly selective tolerance and an ‘ends justifies means’ philosophy sprinkled liberally with subterfuge, bigotry and hate-speech, becomes the new community standard. This is not my opinion; it is simple fact, and fact that is borne out in The Greens’ own propaganda. 

Nowhere is this fact so clearly demonstrated than in The Greens’ views on hunting and firearms ownership.

There are seemingly endless examples of Greens’ statements referring to a “guns culture” or a “hunting culture”, so it is clear by the evidence of their own mouths that they recognise both as cultural pursuits, and having done so they wilfully encourage the community to be utterly intolerant of those cultures.

They claim their justification in statistics drawn from overseas, and based upon the occasional deplorable incident on our own shores, but their true motivation is simply cultural intolerance and paranoia – in short, ol’ fashioned, uncomplicated bigotry.

Were one to suggest that the culture of Islam is unwholesome and dangerous based on the activities of suicide-bombing, acid-tossing, female-oppressing zealots overseas, there would be a hue and cry from The Greens, deploring such suggestions as irrational and xenophobic.  Yet they openly and proudly condemn hunters and vilify them for their cultural pursuits, which are not to Green tastes.

If anyone doubts their campaigns against hunters are racially targeted, for proof one need look no further than The Greens’ relative silence on matters pertaining to Australian Aboriginal hunting.

The Greens’ make no bones about their opposition to the activities and culture of Australia’s white Anglo-Saxon/European (WASE) hunters, claiming they’re cruel, irresponsible, a threat to delicate ecosystems and the sustainability of vulnerable native species, despite the fact that WASE hunters are restricted to hunting non-indigenous (‘feral’) species alone.  However, Aboriginal traditional hunters harvest native species and often with technologies that offer nothing like the accuracy and the swift death promised by even the most basic modern recurve or compound bow, let alone the rifles of today.

Yet The Greens are absolutely mute on the issue of Aboriginal hunting practice, and nothing short of gushing in their praise of efforts to preserve Aboriginal culture in all its diverse and wondrous complexity.

The image of an Aboriginal Elder teaching a child how to fashion and wield a spear or a boomerang is something to be celebrated as an example of a cultural practice preserved. The image of a WASE Elder (grandpa or an uncle perhaps) showing a child how to use a bow or a gun is viewed as an image of manifest irresponsibility; an effort to brainwash children into a culture of violence and cruelty with all manner of negative ramifications that should be of deep concern to the public.

Should Aboriginal Australians hold a festival celebrating their hunting culture, it is seen as something wholesome and cause for celebration. In fact Greens will come from far and wide for the opportunity to immerse themselves in a “highly spiritual cultural experience”.  They will enthusiastically acknowledge the significance of hunting traditions and applaud their preservation as integral aspects of Aboriginal culture.

Should a white Anglo-Saxon/European hunter be photographed with evidence of the success of his/her hunt, the image is repudiated and the hunter reviled as a heartless, violent, sick and in all ways morally corrupt “murderer of innocent animals.”

And the list of racially bias and culturally bigoted hypocrisies goes on.

Of course The Greens have their “anti-hunter” minions, upon whom they rely to make the outrageous statements and conduct the vile and unethical campaigns that the public simply wouldn’t tolerate if they came directly from political representatives. The Greens turn a blind eye to even the most offensive and patently illegal activities of their minions, until challenged to denounce them, at which point they may claim that they had no direct involvement in the activity, and, at a push, perhaps they will even mildly criticise those responsible. But seldom do they denounce actions that deliver on Green objectives.

It’s a real piece of work, is your hard-core anti-hunter. Utterly bereft of ethics, conscience and self-restraint, let alone commonsense, they form The Greens’ front-line national guerrilla network. They come from all walks of life – doctors, public servants, full-time rent-a-crowd activists, schoolteachers, hairdressers; even nuns – and they all claim to be peace-loving nurturing non-violent souls who aspire to build a safer more loving world for us all.  But when it comes to demonstrating tolerance for a culture they cannot empathise with, they demonstrate time and again that they have no ethics and within their breasts beat hearts that are colder than an Alaskan well-digger’s arse.

There is no tactic so low that the anti-hunter will not stoop to plumb its depths, and no threat too evil. Threats of extreme violence against hunters and their families for “murdering innocent animals” are often grotesquely imaginative and unimaginably perverse. For instance, who could forget Emma Garcia's heartfelt wish for a hunter on facebook:

"I hope they get your children, Corey. I hope they get them in the most physically agonizing and psychologically excruciating scenario imaginable. And I hope there's a picture we can share. I mean it and pray for it. I look at that picture of him with that dead, mutilated [insert species here] slaughtered in its prime and I think how better the world would be if the offspring of this monster who share his values would be photographed with rusty saws inserted into their external sphincters as they were beaten to death. If you share his values and have children (I'll be looking so adjust your settings) I hope they meet the same fate.”

Corey’s crime? Well, he shot one of the world’s charismatic species. He shot it legally and humanely, and regardless of one’s personal philosophy with regard to trophy hunting, I ask you....rusty saws for his children, is that an appropriate response, ever?  It is certainly not a rare one!

Every hour of every day, Australian hunters are subjected to unparalleled hate messages and violent threats, both in person and via social media, all from defenders of animal ’innocence’ and people concerned for the existence of guns in the community.

But violence is not their only weapon, nor threats their only language. Public misinformation campaigns, fear-mongering, standover tactics and even forgery are all routinely employed as the weapons of green minions and anti-hunters.  Take the continuing saga of Narooma’s HuntFest for example.

For those readers unfamiliar with the name, HuntFest is a hunting expo held in the NSW south-coast township of Narooma, on the June long weekend. It’s a very new event; in fact this year will be only its second, but the organisers, a small local hunting club, hope that it will someday grow to rival Bendigo’s very successful, annual Wild Deer and Guiding Expo.

Narooma itself is a very beautiful town that was once a recreational fishing Mecca. Caravan parks and hotels were always filled to capacity during the Christmas/New Year period, and the local economy did OK out of seasonal game fishing events and a fairly consistent flow of recreational fishers throughout the off-season too. Then came The Greens, who pushed for the area to be declared a marine park. They were successful, and according to the locals the town’s economy has suffered ever since.

Hotels and businesses are struggling, many shops lay vacant and the economic future for Narooma is a little uncertain. The local Greens and anti-hunters claim the way forward to a future of prosperity for all, lies in the development of ecotourism, based on the re-badging of the area now referred to as “The Nature Coast”. Nothing may be allowed to get in the way of this dream!

If you are a resident and your culture, ideals and philosophies are not commensurate with those of the local Greens and antis, you will be persecuted, your culture roundly criticised and condemned, your initiatives and festivals will be objected to at every step, sabotaged, misrepresented and lied about relentlessly. If you are a hunter or a shooter, you will be called thill-killer, redneck, weekend cowboy, weekend warrior, cruel, heartless, sick, a disgrace etc. You will be accused of putting the community at risk, attempting to normalise a US-style guns culture, trying to brainwash local youth into that same culture, and, in general, the Greens will represent you as a threat to the very fabric of society, harbouring antisocial behaviour, death and mayhem as your ultimate goals.

The Greens may even open a facebook cause page in opposition to your initiative, and if you are really ‘lucky’ you might find your photograph posted on the site to serve as the focal-point of their hatred, below which the antis will post comments making puerile comparisons between gun and penis size, or they may even suggesting that you, “look like the sort of man people should keep small children away from”.

This is what happened to Mr Dan Field, Narooma resident of many years, contributor to the fabric of his community, hunter and one of the organisers of HuntFest.

When Mr Field’s teenage daughters stumbled upon the facebook site vilifying their father for his culture, they pleaded with the administrators to remove the offensive comments, and demanded that the vilification cease.  The response was so very heart-warming. 

A local Greens councillor responded expressing regret that the young women had been offended by the comments made about their father on what the Councillor very tellingly referred to as “our site”, but regretfully informed the teenagers that their father was a public figure and so subject to public criticism. Not until a concerted effort by outraged hunters brought pressure to bear, along with the threat of exposure, was anything done to address the young women’s concerns.

The facebook cause page was pulled down completely, though, I might add, not before a certain outraged hunter (hello!) saved the whole offensive shebang as a stand-alone .HTML file, a copy of which is awaiting the scrutiny of a firm of very competent forensic investigators in order to ascertain if it was, as suspected, a cause page hung off the Eurobodalla Greens’ official facebook presence. Stay tuned!

The inaugural HuntFest was held in 2013 and it was a modest, but encouraging success. Not a single bushwalker was gunned down, the streets failed to run red with blood, mass graves filled with slaughtered native animals failed to materialise in the bush as predicted, milk didn’t curdle, the anti-Christ was not born of the Jackal, the sky didn’t fall and the sun done rose again over Narooma the day after HuntFest 2013.

Not to be out manoeuvred by unaccommodating Fates, the anti-HuntFest offensive is on again in 2014 and already it has exceeded all previously set low standards.

Last night I received an email forward from and anti-HuntFest campaigner.  The email purports to be the work of a local Franciscan nun with form as an anti-Huntfest campaigner, among other things.  Yes, I kid you not, a nun! The email begs people to hearken to the concerns expressed by the good Sister, and pleads with people to sign her anti-HuntFest petition. Further, the email entreats people to pass the word thither and yon, because the Sister’s petition hasn’t found quite the support in the local community it was hoped it would. And boy oh boy, haven’t some run with the ball!  The forward email trail reveals that it has been sent to politicians (local, state and federal) and the entire membership of the National Trust for some bizarre reason, amongst other destinations.

But the plot thickens, because you see the email forwarded on the good Sister’s behalf also carries an attachment purporting to be an example of HuntFest promotional material, which is, in fact, a forgery and a fraud! Oh it carries the HuntFest logo alright, and the South Coast Hunters Club logo too, but they’ve been appropriated from the net, as have the photos of gun-toting kiddies that also adorn the pamphlet without parental consent. And of course the accompanying text has been contrived specifically to misrepresent, mislead and generally infuriate the reader and prejudice his/her views toward HuntFest.  Deary me, a nun?  I may never look at Julie Andrews in quite the same light ever again. Perhaps I have been naive all these years, thinking that Maria risked her life and virtue for love of Austria and the Captain. Perhaps she was a Nazi sympathiser all along, leading those dear little Von Trapp kiddies to their doom trekking aimlessly through the freezing Alps yodelling: edelweiss, edelweiss, every morning you..... 

Fraudulent flyer distributed to damage HuntFest

But seriously, where do these people get off fraudulently misrepresenting HuntFest in order to manipulate opinion and thereby control what may and may not be celebrated as culture?  Is there nothing to which they will not stoop; no depths of unethical conduct too great to plumb?

Bendigo’s Wild Deer and Guiding Expo has been a boon to its community. Last weekend more than 6,000 visitors passed through the gates on day one of the event, and over the whole weekend organisers were hoping to better last year’s figures, when more than 15,000 people attended the Show. Add to that the partners and children who came along for the trip but didn’t attend the event, and we’re talking a lucrative draw-card for the Bendigo community. In fact a quick cruise ‘round the online fora reveals that many didn’t sally forth to Bendigo last weekend, simply because local accommodation was maxed-out. Yet there will be no reported increased in gun violence, no wholesale slaughter of man nor beast; just a culture celebrated and a substantial boost for the local economy rendered as a public service.

Even temps in the 40s failed to deter people from lining to enter
Bendigo's Wild Deer and Guiding Expo

 One cannot help but wonder what will be the consequences of bigoted anti-HuntFest lobbyists denying Narooma the benefits of a similar boost to the off-season economy? Well, let’s look at that...

The Greens and antis claim that guns and the hunting culture pose a threat to the community and imperil the welfare of local youth. Well NEWSFLASH - so does economic hardship!

Suicide rates are at crisis point in the bush, and two of the main drivers of the epidemic are debt and economic uncertainty. When businesses struggle, families suffer, relationships break down and the emotional needs of children are neglected as parents work obscene hours in an effort to keep the family business afloat. Men in particular are given to taking their own lives under the burden of responsibility and due to the feelings of failure they harbour, leaving their partners and children to deal with their loss as well as the loss of the family business and the family home. And of course there’s the knock-on effect.

Each business that fails will have had a staff that now shares in the boss’s misfortune. They also have homes and mortgages, families and financial obligations they can no-longer meet. Unemployment is a strain that will test any relationship and impact negatively on the children of that relationship. When parents are stressed and pushed for time, kids go off the rails. They leave school and in their impotence they may turn to drugs and alcohol as an escape. Youth are by no means strangers to the despair that leads to suicide either. This is something we know only too well on the far south coast!

So tell me Greens, anti-hunters and nuns...how much responsibility will you shoulder for the senseless social carnage your bigoted opposition to HuntFest may bring about? What level of community contempt are you willing to suffer in humble silence because you opposed an initiative that had the potential to relieve the economic burden on the families of Narooma, simply because you are culturally intolerant? 

You have put no plan on the table outlining an alternative to HuntFest with the same economic potential. Will you open your wallets to help these struggling families with the same remorseless vigour that you applied to opening your mouths in opposition to people who are trying to establish a festival to help ease the economic destruction that your Marine Park wrought on a community dependent upon the recreational fishing industry?

To use an overworked catchcry, “exactly how many lives will it take” before you accept that your preferences are not all important, and that your bigotry may in fact cost lives?

I don’t live in Narooma, but if I did, I might be inclined toward a little social activism of my own. I might visit the homes of the local Greens and Antis, and for every suicide or drug overdose that can be associated directly or indirectly with economic distress, I might tie a little posy of flowers to their letterboxes in peaceful recognition of the lives Green and anti-hunter cultural intolerance have destroyed.

Anyway, I’ll get outaya way now...

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WHILE WE'RE ABOUT BANNING STUFF...

Watchin' the tele tonight I was confronted with yet another story about gun-related violence in Sydney's western suburbs, along with the requisite Greens' demand for a guns prohibition of course. And it occurred to me that as we strive to combat The Greens’ efforts to paint every man/woman Jack/Jill of us as irresponsible homicidal hooligans, so that we might retain our meagre rights as law abiding firearms owners and hunters, we’re apt to wear ourselves out in the process of over-intellectualising the Antis' motivation.

It is easy to demand the prohibition of something one has no stake in, while for most it’s impossible to so much as vaguely entertain the notion of withdrawing the right to own something that we find useful, regardless of how effective its prohibition might promise to be in protecting the most vulnerable members of the community i.e our children.

I will explain what I mean in a moment, but first, let's set the scene....

The Greens and the Antis claim that gun violence is rife and that the solution is prohibition of guns in private ownership. 

They acknowledge that it may be necessary to permit limited gun ownership by people who can demonstrate a “genuine need”, but they maintain such cases are very rare.

They acknowledge that prohibiting the ownership of guns will not have an immediate impact on the criminal misuse of firearms because, as we all know, criminals don’t surrender their guns during amnesties and buyback schemes, but they claim that over time prohibition will have an impact on the underworld’s access to firearms.

The Greens and Antis will grudgingly acknowledge that it is unfortunate that responsible firearms owners should be inconvenienced by this vital prohibition, but their inconvenience is a very small price to pay for an end to gun related violence and accidents in the community.

That’s a fairly simplistic roundup of the Anti’s stance I’ll grant you, but I think it pretty-well sums it. And all of it is easy to say because those saying it don’t own guns, and because they don’t own guns they have absolutely nothing to lose by demanding their prohibition. It really is that simple!

Everything else they go on about is just smoke and mirrors aimed at generating the appearance of a higher moral purpose and a genuine need to ban firearms. It is vital that we understand this if we’re to avoid intellectualising their motivation, and so avoid wasting our time and energy trying to address sundry ignoble furphies.

The same may be said of hunting, which they oppose on all manner of grounds, all of which translate as “we don’t do it, so nor should you!”

Their claims of concern for the excessive cruelty of hunting, declining animal populations and the threat to public safety, are simply furphies aimed at convincing a largely unconcerned public that they shouldn’t like hunting either. 

And let me assure you, the vast majority of the general public would remain unconcerned about hunting - on public lands or anywhere else - were it not for The Greens’ and Anti’s considered, strategic and highly emotional investment-sharing of the issue and the fact that the public, on the whole, also has no direct stake in hunting. 

They have nothing to lose by hunting's abolition, or at least they’ve been convinced they have nothing to lose, and so half the Antis' battle is won.

Now let’s look at another example; one that hasn’t been suggested broadly as a comparison as far as I know, but nonetheless runs the same lines of ‘logic’ that the Greens and Anti’s use to justify firearms prohibition. There is one vital difference, however, and that lies the fact that they have a direct stake in the subject of the proposed prohibition, as has pretty-much everyone else...

I happen to think that child pornography is every bit as wicked and detestable as drive-by shootings and armed robbery. Some may not agree, but I think many would too. Some might say that kiddie porn doesn’t kill people like guns do, but how many suicides owe their motivation to the despair wrought by child exploitation?

So if banning guns is the solution (albeit imperfect) to gun violence, surely banning digital cameras is the solution (albeit imperfect) to child pornography?

Let's face it, few of us actually need a digital camera; we just like to own them for one reason or another, and we could always licence folks who have a 'genuine need' to own them.

Perhaps the kiddie-porn-brokers wouldn’t surrender their digital cameras during the amnesty, but given time those already in the community would wear out, and with no replacements available and with no digital cameras remaining in private ownership to be stolen and/or cannibalised for parts, digital cameras would eventually become quite rare.

It’s a pity that law abiding digital camera owners might be inconvenienced by the prohibition, but hey, what price the safety and dignity of our children in whom rests the future of our entire species?

Anyway, people could always return to good ol’ fashioned fil-um, which is much-much harder to digitize for the net and sundry electronic gadgets with the potential to host kiddie-porn, while still allowing responsible folks to take those wholesome family snaps that have seen us right since Joseph-Nicephore Niepce invented the first negative image back in 1826.

Of course no-one would support such a ridiculous move, least of all The Greens and the Antis, but not because the argument for prohibition lacks any intellectual integrity. It has every big as much as The Greens' and Antis' line on gun prohibition. No, the reason they’d not support it is simply that it would have a negative impact on their lives...it would inconvenience them...because they like digital cameras.

Ergo, any suggestion that banning digital cameras will have a serious impact on child exploitation, suddenly becomes ridiculous, perhaps even offensive, not least because implicit in the move to ban them is the suggestion that no-one who currently owns one can be trusted to manage it responsibly.

I believe it is analogies such as this that we must turn to when refuting the 'logic' and ‘fairness’ of the Antis' line on gun prohibition.

We have for too long relied on impotent examples such as, “Well, we may as well ban cars given the annual road toll”, which don't carry weight simply because people are so dependent on cars that they consider them absolutely essential, and so are willing to accept a certain level of carnage as the price of that dependency.

Digital cameras, on the other hand, are anything but essential. In the hands of the majority they are at best a convenience or an amusement that we lived safely and happily without just a decade ago. In the hands of predators, however, they facilitate abuse and exploitation on a growing international scale.

Digital phone cameras travel covertly into every lavatory, shower-block, poolside changing-room, Sunday school, kindergarten and a thousand other places where our children are at their most vulnerable. Surely then, there can be no sound argument for their continued existence in the community....except that we want them and find the suggestion that we might not be trustworthy enough to possess then highly offensive...and so we are willing to accept a certain amount of child carnage so we can continue to indulge our egocentric obsession with posting ‘selfies’ on facebook.

Anyway, I'll get outaya way now....

THE IGNOBLE ART OF JOURNALISTIC DECEPTION

One can hardly have missed the recent furor in the US and around the world, stemming from the Dallas Safari Club's decision to auction an authorised black rhino hunt, all funds raised to be donated to efforts to bring the species back from the brink. One cannot have missed it so I'll not bother to recap. 

 

What I will do, however, is make a few points about the way this non-event has been manipulated and reported by an increasingly hostile and opportunistic media. 

 

Take the article "Hunter Corey Knowlton defends paying $388K to kill rare black rhino" for instance. I love the level of bias 'journalists' Mara Siegler and Emily Smith of the New York Post are bent on conveying in the guise of objective journalism. The Black Rhino is so rare there are only 5000 left "on the planet", they say, as opposed to Africa where the rhino lives....ON THE PLANET!  Instantly the issue has galactic or perhaps even intergalactic ramifications. 

 

Corey Knowlton's facebook page is not simply chockers with snaps of animals he has hunted, oh no! It is "filled with BLOODY IMAGES" of him "PROUDLY posing with animals he has KILLED". Followed by a list of the animals that the journalists calculated to cause the most outrage, a "GIANT BROWN BEAR" - I mean, everyone knows big = worth - and a record breaking Mako shark....as if Western Australia's recent vendetta against sharks hasn't fueled an emotive fire around the world. 

 

'Trophy buck' ... Corey Knowlton with a deer he shot in Texas using a crossbow. Picture: Facebook Source: Supplied

 

And then of course there's the reference to the "preservation of the magnificent, endangered species." If a species is worth saving, it should at least be MAGNIFICENT. Mundane species...not so much. 

 

Whining about the death of an individual, simply because it is a member of a charismatic species is both shallow and self-indulgently messianic to say the least. I know of no peer-reviewed scientific evidence that demonstrates either that a hen’s egg enters the world with a selfless willingness to have its natural span cut short on the edge of a frying pan, or that it is any more or less aware of its imminent fate than a MAGNIFICENT rhino or BIG Brown Bear might be of his.

 

The person who would eat a lamb-chop and venerate the role of the farmer in the community, while denouncing a man who would kill a rhino (legally) is simply playing a hand of individual favouritism. It's shallow and pathetic and for my money, marks out the individuals in the community least suited to engagement in debate about big ticket moral or governance issue. 

 

While I am a hunter, I have no interest in hunting a Rhino, but my personal disinterest in a practice doesn't automatically make that practice wrong. The last few words of the article's penultimate sentence hold the key to this debate, "No rhino is immortal." 

 

Game management best practice recognises that in order to increase a species it is often necessary to manage breeding stock by culling Alpha males, who, while still controlling a herd or haren, are often not the most potent males on the ground. These males are therefore removed from the population so as to take the 'dips' out of the population growth data that, while perfectly sustainable in an untrammeled natural world, are hugely counterproductive when the objective is to increase the species and diversify the gene-pool quickly in a changed world offering limited ranges and subject to pressures such as poaching. 

 

In short, the only thing at issue here is resources.

 

On one hand the rhino could be culled by local authorities, which costs money and returns nothing whatsoever to the regeneration of numbers, other than a corpse. On the other, the rhino has his fun and his death returns hundreds of thousands of dollars to the program.

 

Emotive claims such as I've seen on animal welfare sites, suggesting that if the hunter were really interested in the salvation of the species he would just donate $350,000 to the breading program and let the poor rhino live, betray a level of naivety and self-indulgent, uninformed stupidity of such depth as to beggar belief. Hunted or culled, the rhino is scheduled to have his life cut short. The only issue of relevance is how its death might be managed to best advantage for the health of the species, and returning more than a quarter of a million dollars to the cause is not a bad contribution to make. 

 

Of course a cashed-up preservationist might have bid for the rhino, chucked in enough additional cash to buy a few hundred acres of bush and set-up a trust-fund to keep him in hay and girls for the rest of his natural life...but they didn't did they. They didn't, simply because they recognise that it would be counterproductive to do so, because they also recognice that the rhino has to be culled, and because they get their gollies-off by whining about the evils of hunters and hunting. Pure manipulative, pontificating self-indulgence from an ilk that measures its worth in terms of how many non-issues it can get angry about, thus appearing to be superior to those more moderate thinkers, who prefer to consider an issue or practice before roundly condemning it.

 

And they are sooooo angry, as a quick trip to a hunters website will amply demonstrate.

There you will find myriad threats and expressions of profound and often fatal ill-will against hunters, their partners and even their children, all contributed by "animal lovers" and welfare advocates. 

 

Animal rights/welfare advocates threatening to kill people and maim their children...it's not something we see reported in the media is it?  Silly me...to do so would be tantamount to journalistic professionalism and ballance. Heaven forefend!

Anyway, I'll get outaya way now....

FIELD ARCHERS AND BOWHUNTERS (FAB) BRANCH UPDATE

As some of you will recall, back in July this year I floated the idea of setting up a branch of the Shooters & Fishers Party that would be specific to field archers and bowhunters.

Its primary purpose would be to provide our sector with an active and very audible voice to fill a representative void that has existed for far too long.

Such a branch would be well positioned to advise the Party on priorities and concerns from the archers' point of view, while also providing a ready source of expert advice and guidance for our representatives on the floor of State Parliament.

Your feedback indicated strong support for such an organisation, while also making it very clear that you thought it should have a much wider brief in support of our sector.

As a result of the feedback and the support this idea received from you its stakeholders, I set-up a public meeting at Parliament House Sydney, in order to discuss our ideas and concerns with S&FP Parliamentarians; to float some ideas about how we might proceed, and to set-up the first Shooters and Fishers state branch of field archers and bowhunters.

I can now report that the Field Archers and Bowhunters branch – or ‘FAB’ for short - has been formalised with the full and enthusiastic support of the Shooters and Fishers Party.

An inaugural seven member committee has been elected to steer the FAB through its establishment phase until a broad democratic process can take over at its inaugural AGM in 2014.

Perhaps most importantly, the committee is skills rather than grievance-based, and I believe this will be a great asset to our sector.

Garry Mallard (Chair)
Antonio Lara (Secretary)
David Baker (Treasurer)
Michael Caelli
Andrew Maughan
Gary Nichols
Peter Fairhall

The committee is made up of equal numbers of field archers and bowhunters or a combination of the two, and expert skills and knowledge we’ll be able to harness include, but are certainly not restricted to:

• Member management and marketing

• Information technology

• Documentary film-making

• Funding and grant scoping

• Commercial publishing

• Education and safety

•  National coaching credentials

• Creative writing, including the preparation of media releases 

• Media monitoring and communications, and the list goes on...

Each committee member aspires to the highest levels of professionalism and integrity, but perhaps most importantly, each is doggedly committed to the promotion of our sport and culture, its preservation and its growth.

There are many ways in which our sector requires representation, promotion and support to help it prosper and grow, and no one agency is going to be able to make great inroads into those needs in the short term. However, nor will we accomplish anything if we allow ourselves to be so daunted by the scope of the task that we are too frightened to step up to the peg.

The key lies in identifying short, medium and long-term goals and setting priorities, and this is where we need your help.

The FAB invites stakeholders to help it identify its priorities. This is an important opportunity to have direct input into our direction.

Your feedback will also influence the FAB’s Mission Statement which is also under development.

There are three key areas that we are seeking your advice about: 

1. What are your main concerns for field archery and/or bowhunting?
   
   
2. In your opinion, in what ways has representation of field archery and/or bowhunting been lacking to date?
   
   
3. What two things could the FAB do to better support and/or represent field archery/bowhunting?

Your responses to these questions need not be detailed, nor need you be an old hand or an ‘expert’ in any particular discipline for your input to be relevant. We just want to know your priorities to help us ascertain if we’re on the right path.

You can send your feedback to fabnsw@gmail.com  

All input will be treated as strictly confidential and will be available only to the FAB committee.

Questions about the FAB can also be directed to fabnsw@gmail.com 

The committee is determined to ensure that the FAB is a stakeholder driven representative force for the preservation and growth of our sport and our culture. Your input and support will help us to achieve these goals.

Current Shooters and Fishers Party members will be able to affiliate with the FAB, internally, by a process still under development and people new to the Party can nominate the FAB as their branch at sign-up. For further information contact Shooters and Fishers or the Field Archers and Bowhunters (FAB) branch  at  fabnsw@gmail.com

Garry Mallard OAM

FAB Chairman
For and on behalf
The NSW Field Archers & Bowhunters Branch
The Shooters and Fishers Party

TIME FOR A LITTLE PERSPECTIVE ON THE ARROW-SHOT WILDLIFE PHENOMENON

Shooting a duck a goose (or even a duckgoose), or any other native or domestic animal with a target arrow is irresponsible and unethical. It is also, more likely than not, the act of a child and not a hunter.

Having said that, the so-called ‘spate’ of five such attacks reported today by Phil Hickey (PerthNow, August 26th, 2013 here) is anything but a reflection of a growing weapons mentality within the community, as the Greens and the Antis would have the public believe. Rather, it is a perfectly predictable response to a recent ‘spate’ of movies featuring heroes/heroines of such prodigious ability that they can shoot the wings off a fly, or nail bouncing tennis balls to a wall.

In my day it was Dennis the Menace with his trusty shanghai in his back pocket who reigned over a period of bulbul and sparrow slaughter of Biblical proportions. Society ‘banned’ the shanghai and went on its merry way, safe in the knowledge that the slaughter had been halted. 

Like hell it had!

Kids simply started carrying backpacks, in which to conceal their shanghais along with an impressive arsenal of clay balls, marbles and ball-bearings each with its own specific target or killing properties, and the hunt continued.

Boys, and occasionally even girls, will be boys!

Unlike the arrow incidents that have featured in the press of late, a bird shot with a shanghai falls to the ground with no telltale projectile protruding from its body. The casual observer sees only a dead or injured bird, whose injuries are indistinguishable from those sustained in an encounter with a windshield or window, the pellet having long-since disappeared into the grass.

No doubt the Antis will cry-out for regulation or even prohibition of bows, but how does one regulate books, trees, reeds, feathers and string? I had a bow when I was a nipper, and it was a pretty effective little demon too as I recall, but I didn’t buy it from a sports store, I made it myself, just as I made my many trusty shanghais....oops, sorry, "bait casters".

Banning or attempting to regulate the use of bows as a response to a relative handful of acts by over exuberant kids would be an over-reaction of quite stunningly self-indulgent proportions. So what’s the alternative...do nothing?  Well yes almost, although as a first course of action we could show a little respect for our youth by acknowledging that despite the existence of a world of pressures encouraging them to kill and maim just for the hell of it, the overwhelming majority will choose not to.

The Australian community – hunters and archers among them – already promotes responsible and ethical animal welfare principles, and has done since way back before Adam played fullback for Jerusalem. This should continue, but it should continue with some perspective...

• The Australian population (21mil approx) is greater than it has ever been,

• Bow and arrow are readily available and cheap in all states and territories,

• There is a profusion of video games, movies and even cartoons glamorising violence, including violence with bow and arrow,

• The capacity for the public to capture images of impaled wildlife has never been greater than it is today,

• The national media is lucky to come up with 2 dozen cases of arrow-shot wildlife annually, and

• One notorious 20klm stretch of the Snowy Mountain Hwy alone claims 400+ eastern gray kangaroos annually....and that's just the 400+ that stay put when they're rundown. Who knows how many more continue into the scrub to die slow agonising deaths just out of site?

Decreasing the speed limit on the Snowy Mountains Hwy to 60klm per hour around dawn and dusk when car/kangaroo encounters are most common would increase both human and kangaroo response times considerably, thus saving countless lives.

But while the Antis would not be inconvenienced in the slightest if bows were banned, they would be astonishingly inconvenienced if the time it took them to get to and from work [sic] doubled.  Thus, bows should be banned, but road-kills, while deeply regretted, are an unfortunate fact of life.

The Antis will say that I’m wrong, on all counts. They’re a notoriously contrary lot....though I’m sure they would not agree.

Anyway, I'll get outaya way now....

PORCINE SMUGGLERS AND MEDIA MANIPULATION

In recent weeks the media has reported a number of incidents of illegal feral pig transportation.  The first report was concerning enough, but subsequent reports have increasingly inferred that ‘hunters’ are transporting the feral menace in order to seed new hunting grounds on public lands close to metropolitan Sydney.

This morning I had a conversation with a journalist, who, while ostensibly calling to ask me what I thought about the transportation of feral pigs in general, was clearly on a fishing expedition.  She wanted to know why hunters would be intent on infesting our precious bushland with a menace as ecologically devastating as feral pigs. My response was brief and to the point – 

“Responsible conservation and/or cultural ‘hunters’ would not. Irresponsible people might. There is a difference between the two!”

What followed was an hour long conversation about the difference between hunters and people who simply derive recreational satisfaction from killing animals.  I may as well have been trying to convert the Pope to Islam, but the conversation did yield some troubling information about where the media’s slant on the transportation issue might be heading.

It was no news to me that bowhunters are about to be used as pawns (again!) in the anti-hunting lobby’s push to eliminate hunting of all kinds by means of a public fear & smear misinformation campaign.

Regular readers will be aware that I have touched on this issue before i.e. the portrayal of examples of inappropriate bow and arrow use for the purpose of painting all hunters as cruel individuals, without regard for the law or the basic tenets of animal welfare. Bowhunters are particularly vulnerable to this unscrupulous strategy. While an animal that is not successfully retrieved by a responsible shooter may be hard to distinguish from one that died of old age, poisoning or a chance encounter with a car, the bowhunter’s errant quarry may be found months or even years later with 20 or more inches of evidence still in situ. I am referring of course to the arrow.

This makes us sitting ducks for opportunists who are constantly on the lookout for a visually confronting image with which to punctuate their ant-hunting messages. Indeed it has been suggested that with the purchase of a dozen target arrows from eBay and with the assistance of a little road-kill collected by night, the dedicated anti-hunting activist can fabricate ‘evidence’ aplenty with little fear that anyone will challenge their claims or concern themselves with the expensive business of establishing the animal’s actual cause of death.

It seems that following on the heels or recent pig transportation reports, the media is developing a Machiavellian scenario with which to portray bowhunters as the very personification of ecological vandalism, cruelty and disregard for public safety. The scenario currently under development for exposure to an impressionable public goes something like this...

Hunters have been intercepted transporting feral pigs (and lord knows what else) in areas approaching metropolitan Sydney, but what could they possibly hope to achieve? After all, hunting on public lands has been comprehensively scuttled by Premier O’Farrell, and national parks in close proximity to Sydney were never going to be opened to legal recreational hunting anyway. Sure the parks could be seeded with pigs, but the first gunshot to ring-out would draw rangers, concerned citizens, police swat teams et al quicker than you could say, “Not Happy Barry!”

Likewise doggers with cages full of dogs aboard their utes. Find a utility with a cage on the back parked in a national park and in no time flat it’ll be under guard and the bush will be swarming with Rangers with open notebooks looking to 'interview' the owner.

But what about bowhunters?

They drive ordinary vehicles that betray no indication of a hunting raison d’être.  A bow and arrows can be carried in a backpack, along with camouflage clothing etc, until the hunter has walked far enough into the bush to be out of sight. The bowhunter can then assemble his/her gear and move silently through the bush until a quarry is found and of course firing a bow results in no telltale report so the public need never know they’re sharing the bush with dangerous hunters.

Could the recent spate of feral pig transportations be a preparatory measure associated with shooters’ who are concerned about diminishing access to public lands? Maybe they intend to change disciplines so they can shoot illegally, undetected, close to home?

The only way to ensure the continued safety of ‘our’ national parks is to restrict the sale of archery equipment, perhaps place the bow & arrow under the same administrative controls as firearms. After all, bowhunting is the equivalent of shooting with silencers and it should be banned!

It remains to be seen if this devious line can achieve any traction in the public domain, but the fact that the Fairfax media may be weaving such a web of deceit, illustrates just how vulnerable bowhunters are.  Moreover, it demonstrates how desperately we need a strong, cohesive and above all a vigilant and proactive representative voice for our discipline.  Without it I fear the day may soon come when we’re subjected to a bow buyback program.

Think it can’t happen? That’s what many shooters thought in 1996...and again in 2003. I know, I was one of them!

On Wednesday August 21st, 2013, a meeting will convene in Sydney. The purpose of this meeting will be to launch Australia’s first Field Archers and Bowhunters (FAB) state branch of the Shooters and Fishers Party. The meeting will include the election of basic office bearers and the discussion of initial proprieties.

The purpose of the FAB will be to further the objectives of its stakeholders. The details of exactly how we will achieve this goal will be determined after thorough consultation, but some initial priorities have been identified by listening to stakeholder feedback. They include:-

• the identification of immediate priorities,
• the identification of key long-term objectives and the development of a strategic plan,
• the creation of a reference group that will provide expert advice and guidance to the Shooters and Fishers Party’s political representatives on issues affecting field archery and bowhunting, and
• the development of robust and reliable mechanisms to facilitate regular consultation with field archers and bowhunters within the Party, to seek direction from them and determine their ongoing priorities. 

The launch of the Field Archers and Bowhunters (FAB) branch has the enthusiastic in-principle support of the Shooters and Fishers Party of NSW. 

The evening will commence with a welcome from Shooters and Fishers Party MPs Robert Brown and Robert Borsak, who will provide some background and an overview of the evening’s objectives. They will also be available to answer any questions you may have about the Party’s priorities and strategies for reclaiming ground recently lost as a result of the O’Farrell government’s abolition of Game Council NSW, the suspension of hunting on all public lands and the exclusion of bowhunting from the proposed trial of hunting in 12 NSW national parks, due to begin in October 2013.

If you are a member of the Shooters and Fishers Party who is interested in joining us on August 21st for the launch of the FAB; if you have suggestions for priorities, ideas about strategies or resources that might be of use to the FAB, or if you’re just interested in being kept in the loop, please contact the facilitator at fabnsw@gmail.com

There will be limited seating at the Sydney launch, so if you’re keen to attend please let us know as soon as possible for seating and catering purposes.

If you’re not yet a member of the Shooters and Fishers Party, for just $30 you can correct that oversight here

You may also wish to consider signing the “Barry O’Farrell – Stop your attack on law-abiding hunters” petition here

And of course don't forget the rally in Sydney on Wednesday August 14 for the reinstatement of hunting rights. You'll find details about that event here

Anyway, I’ll get outaya way now....