Misguided sympathies a crock
HOW many human deaths from crocodile attacks in populated areas are acceptable?
If your answer is anything other than “zero”, you represent the perplexing group of people who should make the rest of the population extremely uncomfortable.
This month, a woman with dementia was taken by a crocodile at Port Douglas after she wandered off, got lost and strayed close to a creek.
Amazingly, her family rejected calls to cull the animals, saying basically “crocs will be crocs”.
That is true, but it shouldn’t be tolerated where people live, where they fish, where they walk their dogs and where they might mistakenly walk close to a creek. How is it acceptable that we are willing to sacrifice humans who make a simple error just so deadly animals can thrive?
What’s worse is that our majorparty state politicians are using crocodiles as pawns to appease a vocal minority of animal rights activists.
Katter’s Australian Party MPs have tried to pass laws allowing crocs to be shot and for eggs to be harvested from the wild.
But this has been blocked by Labor and the LNP just so they can take credit with their own softer plans. At least the LNP policy includes some shooting and egg collection.
But knocking back the KAP bill is yet another example of politicians opposing good ideas simply because it’s been put up by a different party.
Such pettiness belongs in a schoolyard, not when lives are at stake.
Critics are horrified at the thought of using guns to control crocs but this is exactly what is needed – mainly because it’s been proven to work.
Anyone who grew up in the North more than 20 years ago knows that we were all advised to watch out for crocodiles. But you’d be flat out finding anyone who even saw one back then, let alone who had a close encounter with one.
We knew they were there, we saw evidence that they were around but they were so terrified of humans that they stayed well away. Large-calibre bullets whizzing around their heads proved to be a great deterrent. Crocs knew they weren’t the baddest things in the area and behaved accordingly.
They were few in number and saw humans as trouble – now they see them as food.
After decades of being treated with kid gloves, they no longer respect humans and have resumed behaving like the dominant animal.
While trapping and relocating will likely reduce croc populations in urban areas, it doesn’t add the fear factor which was so crucial to keeping people safe in days gone by.
To put things in perspective, croc sightings have increased 38 per cent in the past two years – and that’s just the reported ones.
The KAP claims people are being killed by crocs at the rate of one a year in the North and that suburban swimming beaches such as Pallarenda in Townsville, Forrest Beach near Ingham, Palm Cove near Cairns and Four Mile Beach at Port Douglas are being closed almost weekly as crocs brazenly patrol their territory where families swim and walk their dogs.
But it’s out of sight, out of mind for our gormless overlords in Brisbane who think they know best and who recently knocked back a suggestion to move their crocodile department to North Queensland.
It also pays to bring up the fact the Gold Coast City Council recently drained a suburban lake to get rid of just one venomous stonefish.
Yep, when lives are threatened in the southeast, authorities act instantly, but don’t worry about us “rednecks” up North …
The simplest solution is for the government to get out of croc management altogether.
It should lift the reptiles’ “protected” status and allow farmers, crocskin dealers, egg collectors, safari hunters and professional marksmen to deal with the problem.
The aim is fewer crocs and to make them petrified of humans again, bearing in mind that there are vast uninhabited areas of Cape York where crocs can thrive unmolested.
People’s safety obviously can’t be guaranteed but the odds would be a hell of a lot better, as they were 20-30 years ago. If you don’t support a cull, you should also demand an end to the annual slaughter of marine stingers, and of mosquitoes by way of mass fogging, but no one does and no one can adequately explain why.