THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Duck hunting season begins in Victoria despite inquiry recommending it be outlawed

Duck hunting season begins in Victoria despite inquiry recommending it be outlawed

This is of course an emotional issue rather than a logical one. If you kill animals for food what does it matter which animal you kill? And poultry are a very widespread source of food. The KFC and Nando's chains would not exist otherwise.

Hunting any animal is not for me but we have in fact evolved to kill animals for food. So hunters are doing a very human thing. One can only hope that the people "rescuing" ducks are also kind to their fellow human beings.

I do myself rather like ducks both in the environment and on my plate but they are a very capable creature so there is never going to be any scarcity of them. Quacking creatures in ponds are very common

In wetlands across Victoria, camouflaged hunters waded into the water on Wednesday, turned their shotguns to the sky and began to bring down ducks.

At Lake Lyndger, near the wheat-growing town of Boort, Danny Ryan is waiting waist-deep in water at 8am — the moment Victoria's 2024 duck hunting season commenced.

Mr Ryan, a longtime hunter and spokesperson for the Victorian Duck Hunters Association, points to several dead tree stumps and marks an imaginary line.

This is the distance within which he will shoot ducks, he says, as it is more likely to lead to an accurate shot and an ethical kill.

Under mounting pressure and increased regulations, duck hunters like Mr Ryan are keen to stress their efforts to hunt humanely.

In a little over an hour, Mr Ryan kills three grey teal, one black duck and one wood duck. His haul is one short of the daily limit of six ducks.

It takes skill to identify from the silhouette, size and movement of the duck whether it's a species that can legally be hunted, and as birds come and go, frenzied gunfire gives way to the natural sounds of the wetlands and moments of peace.

"You get to be at one with nature, but at the same time you're interacting with nature and you're harvesting wild game birds," Mr Ryan says.

Some of the ducks the hunter shoots are killed instantly and some fall to the water injured and need to be shot again.

Some he will he eat, he says, and some will be shared with family.

Is it crueller than eating an animal raised in captivity?

"I think the majority of people if they sat down and had a really good think about that, I think that they would come on the side of 'No, the duck's had a better life'," Mr Ryan says.

Last year, a parliamentary inquiry recommended outlawing duck hunting, and many thought the 2023 season would be Victoria's last.

The inquiry cited long-term decline of native birds, animal welfare concerns regarding wounding rates, the unacceptable wounding and death rates of threatened species, and the inability to enforce compliance, as the major factors leading to its recommendation.

But the hunters are back for another season this year, after the Labor state government declined to implement the ban.

And a polarised debate continues over whether the pursuit is a noble way to stay connected to where our food comes from, or the sport of bloodthirsty killers.

The duck rescuers

On the shores of a lake near Charlton, a dozen or so Coalition Against Duck Shooting (CADS) volunteers wait to retrieve injured birds from the water.

Without a hunting license they risk a fine if they enter the water before 10am or get within 10 metres of a hunter.

Some members do enter the water, dressed in high-vis vests, and paddle kayaks with flags and whistles to shepherd ducks away from hunters.

Leading the team is David Evans, who darts around the other volunteers, his head slightly bowed and a walkie-talkie in hand, perpetually in motion.

For 28 years he has spent his autumns scouting wetlands, plucking injured birds from the water, documenting illegal killings and antagonising hunters..

Gone are the days of 8,000 shooters with pump action shotguns, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, he says.

"I think we're lucky to have 50 here in this wetland [today]," he says.

The decline in hunters gives him hope, and he believes public opinion is on his side.

This year, on the opening day of the season, interactions between hunters and those who oppose them are relatively calm, and Mr Evans says it has been that way ever since the proliferation of digital cameras.

But the rescuers say they are often verbally abused and threatened by the hunters, while shooters complain of CADS volunteers rescuing injured birds from the water before they can be killed and collected.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-13/victoria-duck-hunting-season-begins-despite-inquiry/103699988

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Duck hunting season begins in Victoria despite inquiry recommending it be outlawed

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