Wallaby Fencing

We have completed wallaby fencing our top boundary. Our farm was the final link in a fence stretching for many kilometres that separates valuable pasture from the bush and forestry that occupies the high country to our west.

Wallaby Fencing. The final link.

The wallabies had been pouring in from the bush at night and stripping large areas of our top paddock bare. The case for wallaby fencing was overwhelming. Trials in four areas of Tasmania have defined the losses of farm animal productivity due to competing native animals. These trials showed that properly installed wallaby proof fencing is effective and over 35% more livestock can be carried.

The loss of productivity on unfenced pastures was again confirmed in a recent University of Tasmania study. It concluded that wildlife were taking 40% of available grazing on the 2100-hectare property. Exclusion fencing trials with wallaby wire again proved to be very effective in keeping wallabies from pasture.

Wallaby fencing is not a silver bullet; it requires regular inspections and maintenance to prevent wallabies coming through under the fence. One only has to look at the bush side of our fence to appreciate the number of wallabies coming out at night looking for an easy feed.

Wallabies are churning the soil to slush as they try to get an easy feed.

Of course Tasmania has a dark side, another option to control native animals, an option that is outlawed in the rest of Australia and the entire civilised world.

1080 poison.

Supporters of 1080 continually regurgitate the oft-quoted myth about the cost of wallaby fencing being prohibitively expensive for Tasmanian producers. This is a nonsense argument. The high carrying capacity of Tasmanian pastoral land with stocking rates sometimes in excess of one beast to the acre means that the cost of fencing per livestock unit is some of the cheapest in Australia. Lazy incompetent property management is instead propped up with publicly subsidised 1080 poison.

That anyone could still support the use of 1080 poison to control native animals such as the Bennett's Wallaby, Pademelons and Possums given the effective alternatives defies belief. The fact that this practice is still legal is proof enough that Tasmanian politicians are morally and ethically bankrupt.

Nothing that Tasmanians don’t already know.