Tuesday 17 September 2013

Queensland's Flying Foxes

Flying Foxes are gorgeous, fruit-eating 'megabats'. In 2008, the Queensland government banned the inhumane shooting of flying foxes as a crop protection measure. However, in 2012, the decision was reversed and farmers now are allowed to shoot a permitted number of these bats in their orchards. The fact that these bats are an indispensable element of the ecosystem as pollinators and seed dispersers has been overlooked, so has the threatened status of two flying fox species- the Spectacled and the Grey-headed Flying Foxes. The methods of extermination employed have been proven to be cruel and ineffective, and the permits are often violated. Flying foxes are slow breeders and conservationists fear that if their numbers plummet, they may not be sustainable anymore. http://www.dontshootbats.com/ is campaigning for the protection of Queensland's flying foxes. Visit the site for more information about the issue.
Creative Commons License
This work by Rohan Chakravarty is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

4 comments:

  1. In a world where conservation is becoming a popularity contest, politicians select an "iconic" or "cute" species to save. For those that don't meet this random and inappropriate measure, they turn away, or worse, they turn against. The shooting of flying foxes in Queensland is not only ecologically unsound, it is inhumane, with many of the animals that are shot taking hours, or even days to die. Sometimes, it takes someone like Rohan, to look at it from a new perspective, for the serious message to get through. Well done Rohan, thank you.

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  2. Then how do you propose we control a species that has grown to plague proportions in some areas? Letting their numbers continue to explode is just as inhumane as baiting or shooting them. Eventually they'll begin to starve. And right now, yes, they ARE a pest.

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  3. @thelastdon- Thanks for your inputs. Do go through http://www.dontshootbats.com/ngo-statement.html . There are a few suggestions that have been effectively implemented.

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