Response to Buns in the Gun – Letter to the Editor

Letter to the Editor -  Response to Buns in the Gun (Mercury, 1 February 2025)

As an advocate for Tasmania’s agricultural sector, TasFarmers read with great interest your recent article “Buns in the Gun” (1 February 2025), regarding the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party’s proposal to manage the state’s increasing rabbit population. TasFarmers are acutely aware of the extent of rabbit populations in Tasmania and the damage stemming from these out-of-control populations. 

Rabbits are a major threat to Tasmania’s farming communities, causing extensive damage to crop, pastures, and native ecosystems. Their unchecked population growth leads to soil degradation, increased competition for feed, and costly losses for producers already facing economic pressures.

TasFarmers have been lobbying successive state government’s for over 15 years to allow the use of sound suppressors for pest management and crop protection.   

In 2011, the Tasmanian Government released the final report on the Alternatives to 1080 Program, a $4 million dollar program to accelerate research into, and implementation of, alternative strategies for control of damage by browsing wildlife on private forests and agricultural land. This program included a trial of firearm sound suppressors (silencers) which were found to improve the effectiveness of shooting as a control effort.  

TasFarmers, in their role as a state farming organisation, continues to advocate on the need for sound suppressors as outlined in this article and implore the state government to act on the important issue of allowing sound suppressors for pest control and crop protection purposes as they are already being used in New Zealand and the United Kingdom.