Key departmental publications, e.g. annual reports, budget papers and program guidelines are available in our online archive.
Much of the material listed on these archived web pages has been superseded, or served a particular purpose at a particular time. It may contain references to activities or policies that have no current application. Many archived documents may link to web pages that have moved or no longer exist, or may refer to other documents that are no longer available.
Stage 4 Report: A list of key recommendations that land managers and owners should consider in relation to effectively and humanely managing the impact of feral pigs on native wildlife, especially nationally listed threatened species and ecological communities.
Brendan Cowled, Steven Lapidge and Laurie Twigg
Pest Animal Control Cooperative Research Centre, May 2004
- The purpose of this report is to provide a list of key recommendations that land managers
and owners should consider in relation to effectively and humanely managing the impact
of feral pigs on native ecosystems, especially nationally listed threatened species and
ecological communities. After consultation with the DEH, a summary of Stages 1 to 3 was
compiled to meet these requirements. A variety of sources of information were used to
provide additional information including Standard Operating Procedures from NSW
Agriculture. For complete information, refer to Stages 1 to 3.
- Methods available to control the impacts of feral pigs in Australia include ground baiting
(warfarin, 1080, yellow phosphorus), aerial baiting (1080), trapping, exclusion fencing,
hunting and harvesting, aerial shooting, ground shooting, habitat modification and the
Judas pig technique. Other methods such as snaring and ground baiting with zinc
phosphide are used overseas.
- No recommended control method can be offered that suits every situation since the best
tool will vary depending upon the unique requirements of each control program.
- Generally, the effectiveness of a feral pig control tools can be assessed by establishing the
effectiveness , cost effectiveness, safety to non-targets and practicality of the method.
- When feral pig control is planned, managers need to know how much control (effort per
unit area which varies depending on the efficiency of the method utilised and feral pig
density) to apply to achieve the required level of damage mitigation. In an ideal world, a
manager would have calibrated the relationships between control effort or cost and the
change in pig densities this would achieve and the resulting changes in the condition or
numbers of the valued resources being impacted by the pigs. However, this information is
rarely available a priori for managers, who are left with the difficult decision on how
much to spend to monitor their success or failure. If they spend too much of their budget
to achieve certainty, they restrict their ability to do more pig control. But, if they spend
nothing or too little on monitoring they run the risk that they did not achieve the goals of
the operation, the impacts remain unacceptable but they are unaware of this. The approach
to gain certainty depends on the scale and context of the pig control program, but
inadequately designed monitoring is usually money wasted. For most ‘conservation’ programs run by government agencies that cover many control operations about 15% of
the total budget appears to be the appropriate proportion to invest in monitoring. Whether
all sites need the same level of monitoring depends on how confidently managers can
extrapolate between sites and the quality of monitoring at priority or representative sites.
Research to understand the relationships between control effort/cost, pig densities and
impacts should be supplemented by planned adaptive management experiments using
differences in control operations to identify better management. When eradication is the
aim the only critical measure of success is the absence of pigs.
- Aerial shooting, ground baiting (warfarin and 1080), trapping and aerial baiting are all
highly eff