Bows, traps, knives, clubs, dogs or shotguns

Policy

While the AJP is opposed to all hunting, it is clear that some forms of hunting should be eliminated as a priority due to the unavoidable level of cruelty involved. We therefore call for an immediate ban on all activities where bows, traps, knives, clubs, dogs or shotguns are used to hunt animals.   

Key Objectives

1. Prohibit, without exception, hunting methods that inherently cause prolonged suffering, including the use of bows, traps, knives, shotguns, clubs and the use of dogs to pursue, attack, or restrain animals.

Background

Certain forms of hunting are particularly cruel, and carry the certainty of prolonged pain and suffering. The community, including many hunters themselves, does not accept extended periods of pain and suffering caused to an animal.  

Polling commissioned by the RSPCA and Birds SA of over 2,000 people in South Australia in 2023 found that almost 90% thought minimising pain was either important or very important. 

The use of bows, traps, knives, or clubs, the use of dogs to pursue, attack, or restrain animals, or the use of shotguns for hunting often results in prolonged pain and suffering and conflicts with the underlying purpose of animal welfare laws that exist in every state and territory in Australia. The existence of such laws can mislead the public into thinking that the activities are regulated to prohibit cruelty. However, a broad range of exemptions and defences to these laws allow for many of these forms of hunting \-  that would otherwise constitute animal cruelty \- to occur legally. 

Hunters can have animals torn apart by dogs. Hunters can also stab animals, trap them, or shoot them multiple times with arrows (except in SA, which has banned bow hunting). This can allow animals to escape and suffer a slow death, or at best, to endure a painful recovery. Injured animals are at high risk of wound infection, malnutrition, and, depending on species, of predation by other animals. These risks also impact juvenile animals reliant on an injured parent for food and protection. Hunters can leave animals flying or limping, injured with shotgun pellets. Some will recover, some will die painfully and slowly.

In all these cases, cruelty isn’t a rare mistake. There is always appalling suffering, regardless of skill, training or practice. Extreme cruelty is an intrinsic property of the method.  

All jurisdictions in Australia ban dog fighting. Yet some still permit hunting practices in which dogs are used to chase, attack, and tear apart other animals. For example, ‘pig dogging’ uses dogs to either hold (or ‘bail up’) an animal so that a hunter can stab or club it, or to kill the animal directly. Such practices—and the legal exemptions that permit them—undermine and contradict the intent of animal welfare laws.

N.B. This policy applies to hunting practices and methods and does not address emergency euthanasia.