A way to reduce ferals?

Buzz Lightbulb · Guru

RE: A way to reduce ferals?

peter67 · Guru

Must have hit the pig on the tip of the snout Buzz, even then I don't think any casual walking would be involved for the pig, more like a mad gallop in the general direction of away.

In summer if pigs have been rolling in clay like mud around station water troughs, they become so thickly caked in mud that hunting projectiles designed to expand quickly will break up in the dried mud on the pigs body and leave only a surface wound. My way round that was to buy cheap ex surplus military steel jacketed ( as opposed to the more normal copper jacketed hunting rounds ) 30.06 ball ammo and get stuck into them with a restocked Garand semi auto.

ps if you want to be nice to crows, and you have money to burn, knock the cats over with a .270, it spreads the cat over a large area of paddock and the crows end up with ready made bite sized pieces. Then you pull the 22.250 improved ( fire formed, sharp shouldered case ) out and shoot the crows, they really explode.

oldbloke · Guru

If shot correctly with an arrow, it is indeed humane. They quickly die due to massive bleeding in the lungs.

How quickly do you think a cat kills a mouse or bird? Slooowly. Life isn't perfect. But yes brain shot are better. It's all about pros and cons and priorities.

P.S. The government is happy to use truck loads of 1080 to poison foxes, dogs and rabbits. Which is better? Arrows or 1080?

-- Edited by oldbloke on Wednesday 16th of March 2022 06:03:28 PM

oldbloke · Guru

If hit in the head and death is not near instant then the brain was missed.

I prefer chest shots, there is more room for error.

Stretch60 · Senior Member

I still have a few kilos of camel left from a hunt in July 2020. North of Leinster WA. They compete for the same feed as the pastoralists cattle. We shot 55 that trip and came away with close to a tonne of meat.

Buzz Lightbulb · Guru

Stretch60 wrote:
I still have a few kilos of camel left from a hunt in July 2020. North of Leinster WA. They compete for the same feed as the pastoralists cattle. We shot 55 that trip and came away with close to a tonne of meat.

I've eaten horse (donkey), emu, kangaroo, etcetera. What does camel taste like?

landy · Guru

Buzz Lightbulb wrote:

Stretch60 wrote:
I still have a few kilos of camel left from a hunt in July 2020. North of Leinster WA. They compete for the same feed as the pastoralists cattle. We shot 55 that trip and came away with close to a tonne of meat.
I've eaten horse (donkey), emu, kangaroo, etcetera. What does camel taste like?

A sort of cross between Echidna and Platypus.

Whenarewethere · Guru

Snails are taking over with all the wet weather, they are great with butter & garlic.

peter67 · Guru

Now there's a fair dinkum quiche eater, on a thread about how to control feral, made of meat animals, I do declare :)

Landy, if you are slow roasting Echidna and Platypus in a good camp oven don't forget to sprinkle the finished dish with plum glazed char grilled Koala nuts.

Buzz Lightbulb · Guru

landy wrote:
Buzz Lightbulb wrote:

Stretch60 wrote:
I still have a few kilos of camel left from a hunt in July 2020. North of Leinster WA. They compete for the same feed as the pastoralists cattle. We shot 55 that trip and came away with close to a tonne of meat.
I've eaten horse (donkey), emu, kangaroo, etcetera. What does camel taste like?

A sort of cross between Echidna and Platypus.

LOL

Whenarewethere · Guru

We were in Chambers Gorge South Australia at the beginning of January 2018 during a cold snap of 35°C. Kangaroos & goats were looking desperately for water. Kangaroos were digging holes in the pebble river bed. We could have dug hole in front of them & they would have barely moved, but it would have helped the goats more.

The scenery of the gorge was brilliant, but the dead rotting carcasses every 100 metres along the gorge was overwhelming. We could smell this on us for a week. It's pervasive to say the least.

I did actually kill a goat that we found with a broken back, only one leg was moving. Smashed a 20kg stone on its head to put it out of its misery quickly, & it was quick. I didn't have a knife on me at the time to cut its throat.

landy · Guru

peter67 wrote:

Now there's a fair dinkum quiche eater, on a thread about how to control feral, made of meat animals, I do declare :)

Landy, if you are slow roasting Echidna and Platypus in a good camp oven don't forget to sprinkle the finished dish with plum glazed char grilled Koala nuts.

Buzz Lightbulb · Guru

Here's a little bit more news about controlling ferals:

Feral-free zones plan in South East NSW to bring native mammals back from the brink of extinction

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-07/feral-pests-native-mammals-extinct-nsw-national-parks/101043116

Now we just need to expand that feral-free zone to include all of Australia.

dorian · Guru

The easiest way to get rid of ferals is to cut off their Centrelink benefits.

Mike Harding · Guru

dorian wrote:
The easiest way to get rid of ferals is to cut off their Centrelink benefits.

A bit broad-brush Dorian but you have a point :)

Due to unemployment a young friend (35ish) I have known for many years took up a job as a bus driver in south east Melbourne a few years past. He is a very relaxed person and has always had a soft spot for the underdog, he sees the good rather than the bad in people and I have almost never known him speak ill of another.

He lasted as a bus driver for two years and when I asked why he was quitting he replied (paraphrase) that he could no longer tolerate the unemployed, drug addled, lazy scum who made up a significant proportion of his clients. I was astonished at the vehemence of his reply.

Not everyone on social security is a poor, hard done-by soul who life has dealt a bad hand to - some *are* lazy little bastards who need a solid kick up the backside and be told to get a job!

DMaxer · Guru

I don't really follow your friend's logic Mike. His job is to drive the bus, not to socialise or make judgements on the lifestyle choices of the passengers. It would be a bit like a criminal lawyer quitting because he didn't like the type of client he or she had. The job is to do the job, not make character assessments.

There are people that rort the system. Some do it by refusing to work whilst others do it by hiding income and not paying the appropriate amount of tax.

I guess public transport would have more needy persons using it, they would hardly be chauffeur driven about. Same as the court system. Most of those appearing in the criminal jurisdiction are poor and unemployed. Society is made up of all kinds. I was grateful and fortunate that I had caring parents and the opportunity to obtain an education. The ones I represented had neither.

86GTS · Guru

Whenarewethere wrote:
Snails are taking over with all the wet weather, they are great with butter & garlic.

From my experience at a top level French restaurant in Melbourne's CBD, the garlic butter is good but the snails taste & chew like a piece of rubber.

Mike Harding · Guru

DMaxer wrote:
I don't really follow your friend's logic Mike. His job is to drive the bus, not to socialise or make judgements on the lifestyle choices of the passengers.

I don't believe that doing his job precludes or prohibits him from observing and making social/moral judgements about the people he observes whilst working, do you? People, even bus drivers Dmaxer, are not automatons.

dorian · Guru

Mike Harding wrote:
dorian wrote:
The easiest way to get rid of ferals is to cut off their Centrelink benefits.
A bit broad-brush Dorian but you have a point :)

You mistake my meaning. I don't have any disdain for the genuinely disadvantaged, only sympathy. In fact I'm on the side of politics that advocates for the widest social security net to ensure that we catch all those who are genuinely in need, even if we have to tolerate a few cheats.

I was merely suggesting that ferals are by nature most likely to be Centrelink clients. I was not suggesting that Centrelink clients are ferals.

DMaxer · Guru

I agree Mike. There is nothing wrong nor is he prohibited from making social/moral judgements whilst carrying out his work duties. It just seems a bit odd that he would quit his job because of it.

I wonder if the other passengers on the bus that were going to work and observed the great unwashed would also be justified in quitting their jobs on the basis they had to share the bus with undesirables.

If people are actively avoiding work whilst on Centrelink they are removed from the benefit. If someone duds the ATO they usually are imprisoned if found guilty. I think that gives a fair indication of which behaviour is the more serious.

Blues Man · Guru

dorian wrote:
The easiest way to get rid of ferals is to cut off their Centrelink benefits.

biggrin biggrin biggrin biggrin biggrin

Mike Harding · Guru

DMaxer wrote:
I wonder if the other passengers on the bus that were going to work and observed the great unwashed would also be justified in quitting their jobs on the basis they had to share the bus with undesirables.

I suspect, Dmaxer, the differences are:

1 - the other passengers generally travel at a time of day when the great unwashed are still in bed or comatose

2 - the other passengers have to tolerate them for, say, only 20 minutes twice a day

3 - my friends has to deal with them for his entire 8/9 hour shift every day - no time off in a nice office with sensible, well educated people for him Dmaxer

Buzz Lightbulb · Guru

I didn't expect the thread to go down this line. cry

dorian · Guru

What sort of quality controls are in place for meat that isn't farmed? What are the health risks?

Magnarc · Guru

Since this thread has gone off topic I submit the following observations. When I sold the removal business at the age of 50, and looking around for some other occupation, I decided that driving a bus was the way to go. Having had 25yrs of lugging pianos, lounge suites and large fridges around, the idea of a job where the load walked on and off on it's own was very appealing.

I worked for 10 yrs driving a bus around Melbourne's Eastern Suburbs and came into contact with a wide variety of people many of them from the lower end of the economic scale. I had drunks that could barely stand, others that had no money for the fare, I have been told many times to "go away and copulate", I was once overtaken by a Police car and stopped so that they could remove a suspected drug dealer from the vehicle, if you were driving the last bus out of a certain notorious railway station at 10-30pm, the chances that a fight would be in progress were very real and, in one instance a fight broke out in the bus driven by another driver who fortunately was unharmed.

Now, being an easy going sort, I quickly realised that diplomacy was the answer in nine out of ten of these situations and it worked for me. Would I have done anything different? no way. I happily went to work each day knowing that each day would be different from the others. There are always unpalatable things on any job, they go with the territory. I have always tried to treat others the way I would like to be treated, would I have left the job because of a few hassles? no way. Loved 98% of it.

I do recognise though that there would be some folk who found the job too stressful. We are all different.

PS. Having had years of truck breakdowns and high maintenance costs, It was a great feeling when something went wrong on a bus, all you had to do was sit there and let someone else pick up the tab!

Phlipper · Senior Member

One of the best things that can be done to control numbers of feral animals of all kinds is put a bounty on their heads, like they did with foxes years ago. We used to get up to $50 a pelt for Foxes, $2 for Rabbit skins. Give farmers and the like an incentive to hunt ferals, extra income. Problem is some people/farmers make money from allowing ferals to thrive and wont commit to killing all of them. Remember the big outcry when it was attempted to wipe out Rabbits with Calicivirus, the makers of Akubra Hats were not happy.....but the suffering farmers were begging to have them eliminated.

Goats are the prime example nowadays where in NSW feral Goats are not eliminated entirely, but are encouraged to breed up to produce an income, The feral Goat population in NSW is astronomical, much to the chagrin of other states. Whereas in other states like SA they are a curse, and a lot of effort goes into trying to eradicate them...goats etc dont follow border restrictions. The Goat meat market caters for the Middle east and surprisingly the USA . How they control quality is a good question ?

Phlipper · Senior Member

dorian wrote:
What sort of quality controls are in place for meat that isn't farmed? What are the health risks?

Good question....from my observations the goats are simply rounded up from the bush and loaded directly into trucks. Goats are tough survivors, maybe they are not prone to diseases ? The amount of Goats being sold to market is huge. Last time I was in Cobar/NSW we were kept awake all night with the sound of a constant line up of trucks all filled to capacity with feral Goats going off to market.

Buzz Lightbulb · Guru

Phlipper wrote:
dorian wrote:
What sort of quality controls are in place for meat that isn't farmed? What are the health risks?
Good question....from my observations the goats are simply rounded up from the bush and loaded directly into trucks. Goats are tough survivors, maybe they are not prone to diseases ? The amount of Goats being sold to market is huge. Last time I was in Cobar/NSW we were kept awake all night with the sound of a constant line up of trucks all filled to capacity with feral Goats going off to market.

When I worked as a Jackaroo, the grazier would kill a beat or pig for food. He'd check for liver fluke and a lot of other things parasites as he was butchering.

I'd imagine that the feral goats etcetera would be slaughtered in abattoirs would also be checked for such things.

dogbox · Guru

oldbloke wrote:

Young goat tastes great.

Many more would be shot if it was permitted. The problem is more and more public land is becoming National Parks or various types of "park". Shooting is not generally permitted in these areas. The State forests are shrinking. Goats, pigs, deer, feral dogs & foxes then build up numbers in these "parks". What else would you expect?

Governments spend little to "manage" these animals. Sometimes pull a lever and get incredibly expensive helicopters in to do the work hunters would be happy to do for free. Or lay 1080, great, almost kill everything.

The Greene's are constantly pushing for more parks. Then they winge that the natives are being killed by foxes or pigs are destroying vegetation. Or that bush fires are getting out of control, well if the parks are " locked up" and no wood collection is allowed, and no regular burns, what would you expect?

Dogs are so restricted in NPs that they are actively discouraging visitors.

Greenies are dumb.

Victoria and NSW are now the only states where hunting is allowed on public land, and that is slowly shrinking.

Farmers are paying the cost in lost sheep and cattle and ruined pasture.

Thankyou Green party and goodies, goodies.

P.S. In Victoria it's still illegal for the public to shoot feral cats on public land. What a laugh.

the greens and greenies are they the same thing ?

oldbloke · Guru

"the greens and greenies are they the same thing ?"

IMO, yes