Overview
- NSW Premier Chris Minns has publicly backed exploring feral animal bounties as a novel tool for reducing populations of goats, pigs and cats.
- The Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party proposal would allocate AUD 2 million for scalp payments of roughly AUD 10–20 per animal.
- Conservationists and CSIRO caution that bounty programs rarely achieve the 57–70 percent annual cull rate needed for population suppression and are prone to fraud and cruelty.
- Farmers say existing methods such as baiting, trapping and aerial culling have failed to stem growing damage and safety risks from wild pigs and cats.
- In Victoria’s 14-year fox bounty, hunters claimed more than 80,000 scalps in 2022 but removed only a fraction of the total invasive fox population.