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West Australian
8 hours ago
- Politics
- West Australian
Animal activists slam NSW plan to pay bounty hunters for feral animal kills
A controversial plan to introduce bounty killings for feral animals and expand hunting rights would 'turn NSW into a South African game park', opponents have claimed. The NSW government came under fire this week after Premier Chris Minns floated the idea of paying shooters for bounties for feral animals, including cats and pigs. The proposal forms part of sweeping reforms proposed by the NSW Shooters, Fishers and Farmers party to hunting rights, including a new minister for hunting. NSW Animal Justice Party MLC Emma Hurst said the Bill would 'take us backward' and bounty killings as a means of population control did not work. 'We know even just from research that these bounty programs don't work, but of course it also allows for extreme animal cruelty,' Ms Hurst said. 'There's no proper sort of oversight or accountability into these programs. It's encouraging a bloodbath for animals. 'The argument that's put forward by the Shooters (party) is that these animals are introduced. 'Therefore, we can do whatever we sort of want to them and we should ignore what animal cruelty is happening to them. 'They have the ability to feel pain and fear and we shouldn't be encouraging some kind of extreme Rambo-style killing spree on these animals within the communities.' Ms Hurst said the Bill, which seeks to open up Crown land to hunting, would 'essentially turn NSW into a South African game park' and waste taxpayer money. She urged for more species-specific control measure for feral animals in NSW, including the use of immunocontraceptive darting that is used overseas. Several feral and invasive species are active in the state, including feral pigs, deer, and camels as well as wild dogs and feral cats. Shooters MLC Rod Borsak said the Bill was about incorporating NSW's about 200,000 licensed hunters into 'the conservation hunting paradigm'. 'The whole idea is to try and develop a system of co-operation … something that brings the recreational hunting side of things into the conservation paradigm,' he said. He went on to add that bounties would 'increase the incentive to farmers and to conservation hunters to go out there and target the animals that we think are important'. Mr Borsak stressed the possibility of bounties to target feral cats that attack native fauna and are 'impossible' to control under the government's current 'instruments'. The long-term Legislative Council representative dismissed the notion that the bounty plan would result in a 'free for all', citing longstanding regulation and safety measures. 'There's a whole lot of rules around all this stuff that has been tried and true for the last 20 years,' Mr Borsak said, referencing concerns about firearms safety. 'Anyone trying to run a scare campaign is moaning in the face of the evidence of what's actually occurred in two or three million hectares of public land in the last 20 years.' Under the plan, a $1m 'pot' would be available for feral pig snouts, which Mr Borsak said could sell for $15-30, with another $1m pool for wild dogs, foxes, and cats. Mr Borsak described hunting as a 'mainstream' activity that 'really benefits rural and regional NSW primarily, and we really should be recognising that'. Under the Bill, spotlighting and the proposed use of thermal scopes would not be allowed on Crown land, including state forests. Nor would the hunting bounty scheme – or any hunting at all – be allowed within national parks in NSW. The proposal was panned by the Invasive Species Council, whose chief executive Jack Gough wrote to Environment Minister Penny Sharpe and Agriculture Minister Tara Moriarty. 'I am writing to urge you to reject the latest attempt by the NSW Shooters Party to undermine effective feral animal control in NSW,' Mr Gough said. 'This time through an attempt to secure government funding for bounties. 'Australia's long history of failed bounties has demonstrated they are expensive, ineffective and undermine genuine feral animal control programs.' The council raised concerns that the scheme could be abused by way of fraud, and feral animal control was 'very different from ad hoc killing'. While dismissing the plan, the council has lauded the successes of aerial culling into reducing the population of feral horses in the Snowy Mountains. While significantly different in purpose, planning, and practice, the shooting of brumbies in the Kosciuszko National Park has been equally divisive. A recent state government report found the population of brumbies in the park could be as low as 1500, down from 13,000 to 22,000 last year. Mr Gough welcomed the report as a 'turning point', with the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service releasing images of ecological recovery in the park. Ms Hurst questioned the government's earlier numbers and suggested alternatives, like darting, were also available. 'The problem that we have is that there's always this messaging pushed out there that it has to be done urgently and it has to be done as quickly as possible,' she said. 'Of course what happens is when you kill a whole lot of animals in any one system they breed back up pretty quickly, so it's always going to be a Band-Aid solution. 'It is not going to work in the long term.'
Perth Now
8 hours ago
- Politics
- Perth Now
Why Aussie state wants bounty hunters
A controversial plan to introduce bounty killings for feral animals and expand hunting rights would 'turn NSW into a South African game park', opponents have claimed. The NSW government came under fire this week after Premier Chris Minns floated the idea of paying shooters for bounties for feral animals, including cats and pigs. The proposal forms part of sweeping reforms proposed by the NSW Shooters, Fishers and Farmers party to hunting rights, including a new minister for hunting. NSW Animal Justice Party MLC Emma Hurst said the Bill would 'take us backward' and bounty killings as a means of population control did not work. 'We know even just from research that these bounty programs don't work, but of course it also allows for extreme animal cruelty,' Ms Hurst said. 'There's no proper sort of oversight or accountability into these programs. It's encouraging a bloodbath for animals. 'The argument that's put forward by the Shooters (party) is that these animals are introduced. 'Therefore, we can do whatever we sort of want to them and we should ignore what animal cruelty is happening to them. 'They have the ability to feel pain and fear and we shouldn't be encouraging some kind of extreme Rambo-style killing spree on these animals within the communities.' NSW Shooters, Fishers and Farmers have proposed a bounty system for feral animals. Credit: News Regional Media Ms Hurst said the Bill, which seeks to open up Crown land to hunting, would 'essentially turn NSW into a South African game park' and waste taxpayer money. She urged for more species-specific control measure for feral animals in NSW, including the use of immunocontraceptive darting that is used overseas. Several feral and invasive species are active in the state, including feral pigs, deer, and camels as well as wild dogs and feral cats. Shooters MLC Rod Borsak said the Bill was about incorporating NSW's about 200,000 licensed hunters into 'the conservation hunting paradigm'. 'The whole idea is to try and develop a system of co-operation … something that brings the recreational hunting side of things into the conservation paradigm,' he said. He went on to add that bounties would 'increase the incentive to farmers and to conservation hunters to go out there and target the animals that we think are important'. Mr Borsak stressed the possibility of bounties to target feral cats that attack native fauna and are 'impossible' to control under the government's current 'instruments'. The long-term Legislative Council representative dismissed the notion that the bounty plan would result in a 'free for all', citing longstanding regulation and safety measures. 'There's a whole lot of rules around all this stuff that has been tried and true for the last 20 years,' Mr Borsak said, referencing concerns about firearms safety. 'Anyone trying to run a scare campaign is moaning in the face of the evidence of what's actually occurred in two or three million hectares of public land in the last 20 years.' NSW Animal Justice Party MLC Emma Hurst said the Bill would 'take us backward'. NewsWire / Simon Bullard. Credit: News Corp Australia Under the plan, a $1m 'pot' would be available for feral pig snouts, which Mr Borsak said could sell for $15-30, with another $1m pool for wild dogs, foxes, and cats. Mr Borsak described hunting as a 'mainstream' activity that 'really benefits rural and regional NSW primarily, and we really should be recognising that'. Under the Bill, spotlighting and the proposed use of thermal scopes would not be allowed on Crown land, including state forests. Nor would the hunting bounty scheme – or any hunting at all – be allowed within national parks in NSW. The proposal was panned by the Invasive Species Council, whose chief executive Jack Gough wrote to Environment Minister Penny Sharpe and Agriculture Minister Tara Moriarty. 'I am writing to urge you to reject the latest attempt by the NSW Shooters Party to undermine effective feral animal control in NSW,' Mr Gough said. 'This time through an attempt to secure government funding for bounties. 'Australia's long history of failed bounties has demonstrated they are expensive, ineffective and undermine genuine feral animal control programs.' The council raised concerns that the scheme could be abused by way of fraud, and feral animal control was 'very different from ad hoc killing'. While dismissing the plan, the council has lauded the successes of aerial culling into reducing the population of feral horses in the Snowy Mountains. While significantly different in purpose, planning, and practice, the shooting of brumbies in the Kosciuszko National Park has been equally divisive. A recent state government report found the population of brumbies in the park could be as low as 1500, down from 13,000 to 22,000 last year. Mr Gough welcomed the report as a 'turning point', with the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service releasing images of ecological recovery in the park. Ms Hurst questioned the government's earlier numbers and suggested alternatives, like darting, were also available. 'The problem that we have is that there's always this messaging pushed out there that it has to be done urgently and it has to be done as quickly as possible,' she said. 'Of course what happens is when you kill a whole lot of animals in any one system they breed back up pretty quickly, so it's always going to be a Band-Aid solution. 'It is not going to work in the long term.'
The National
11 hours ago
- Science
- The National
Humanoid robots pose an ethical dilemma we've long prepared for
Earlier this week, an Edinburgh University lab exemplified the second option. Looking like a toad made from rubbery stickle bricks, it's a 'soft robot' – one that can (with a whiff of air pressure) walk out of its own 3D-manufacturing unit. They'll be useful for nuclear decommissioning, biomedicine and space exploration, says the lab. Great! Robots as curiously shaped facilitators of a cleaner, healthier, more ambitious world. Safely in the background. READ MORE: I've voiced ScotRail trains for 20 years and was replaced with AI without being told And then there are the humanoid robots (or HRs), currently cavorting all over your news feed. They're landing punches as Thai boxers in Hangzhou, China. They're playing badminton (admittedly with an extra two legs) in Zurich, Switzerland. A BMW factory, in the improbably named American town of Spartanburg, already has humanoid bipedal robots assembling parts on the production line (they're also starting in a Hyundai plant later this year). Chinese state-run warehouses in Shanghai have human operators manipulating HRs, getting them to fold T-shirts, make sandwiches and open doors, over and over again. All generating data they can learn from, to act effectively in the near future. Those who keep half an eye on radical technology may be a bit perplexed. Wasn't there some relief in the utter klutziness of robots, as they attempted to negotiate a few stairs, or turn a door knob? Didn't we share their pratfalls gleefully on social media – the bathos (if not hubris) that kept us relatively sane, in these accelerating times? Computers might thrash us at most cognitive tasks. But tying shoelaces, making pizza, wiping a child's nose? Not yet, and maybe not ever. Hail the embodied human, and their evolved physical capabilities! Well, there's a different track opening up. It's partly driven by the sci-fi imagination of the tech bros, East and West: most of these humanoid robots look like the rebellious droids in the 2004 movie I, Robot. But it's also an assumption that the new, actively-learning models of artificial intelligence can do for humanoid robots what they've done for language, visuals and coding. Which is to generate plausible and coherent behaviour in the physical world, as they generate the same for prose or images. Just to state the obvious: there's economic interest here. The target of these companies is a unit that can learn skills as required, flipping from task to task like a human worker. 'You can imagine a supply store has one, and that robot can be in the backroom depalletizing, cleaning, stocking shelves, checking inventory, just a huge range of things,' says Jonathan Hurst, co-founder and chief robot officer at Agility Robotics. Working 24/7, only stopping to be charged: 'That's where the real value comes in', concludes Hurst. READ MORE: Union slams Scottish companies using voice data without consent for new AI announcers The point of a humanoid-like machine seems obvious to most of these entrepreneurs. The world is already designed for humans, and maximum profitability will come from robots stepping competently and confidently into this environment. As the big business consultancies are predicting, the price for a working humanoid might descend to as low as $15,000 within the next few years, certainly lower as production scales up. That starts to become a viable business case for many enterprises – if the devices deliver on the performance promises currently being made. Let's assume (and it may be a major assumption) that physical robotics is on the same exponential curve as the computations of AI (and indeed directly rides on the latter's ascent). What that instantly opens up is a vast archive of myths and tropes about the fearful prospect of creating artificial humans, and how they'll live among us. We've been preparing for this ... READ MORE: From the editor: We're all sick of Farage. But we can't 'just ignore him' Greek mythology had Hephaestus making automatons – self-moving golden handmaidens with 'intelligence in their hearts'. Pygmalion the sculptor fell in love with his statue Galatea; Talos, a giant bronze automaton powered by ichor, guarded Crete. Across ancient India and China, still more defensive robots were imagined: the Buddhist text of Lokapannatti describes mechanical warriors that protected relics in subterranean cities. Back in Europe, the golem was raised to defend the Jewish ghettos. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein directly addresses our capacity to make humanoid subjects, and the ethics of the life we might share with them. And we mustn't forget that the term 'robot' itself comes from the Czech genius Karel Čapek, and his 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) – 'robota' being Czech for forced labour. So right at the core of this domain's name sits the main anxiety we have about it. What does it mean for us to create an entity that we intend will work (or fight) entirely on our behalf? It's one of the deeper, more civilisational arguments against a humanoid robot. Which is that it revives a master-slave framing from the worst of our past. An original cruelty of power that generates many others. The great auteur of human weirdness, filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, articulated this well in his final movie, A.I. (posthumously realised by Steven Spielberg). The robot boy David – and we shouldn't forget the underlying Pinnochio reference – is eventually discarded: he was a substitute for a real boy, who eventually revives from his coma. Kubrick/Spielberg show how distorted human relations become – how resentful, harsh and violent – when these ever-more-perfect humanoid entities move among them. Their various roles of servitude do not protect them. The end of the movie delivers a severe judgement on human morality. The robot boy is rediscovered, by beautifully communal 'mechas', on an utterly drowned and terminated Earth. On David's request, the mechs revive a clone of the human 'mother' who pushed him out into the forest. They are able to share one last, gentle day together. READ MORE: How much has your MP claimed in expenses? See the full Scottish list here The movie never fails to break my heart. But given the ethical dilemma it presents – do we really want to be masters in a society of slaves, again? – we might hope that the humanoids keep failing to turn that doorknob. We really don't know what's coming. From the AI side, will developments in computation generate artificial consciousness, as well as artificial intelligence? By consciousness, I mean an entity which knows that it exists, experiences the world, has goals and desires and values. If that intentionality and interiority appears, and begins to talk with us, we may anticipate one of its explicit interests: the rights of robots, operating under conditions of servitude. How might we respond? I'd suggest A.I. the movie shows us how we shouldn't. Perhaps I'm operating in a very Western framework. As many scholars note, animist religions (whether Japanese or Chinese) do not sharply divide between the animate and inanimate. The robot in Japan is not necessarily monstrous, but can possess 'kokoro' (heart/mind). Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy, flying about the comic strips of a traumatised Japan in the 1950s, was a great example of this. A moral child-robot with atomic powers, seeking justice. I duly note that the most-watched Netflix production this week is The Wild Robot. The machine ROZZUM (Unit 7134) lands on an island teeming with wildlife, to which it slowly begins to relate and co-exist with. Kept in a bubble from marauding, egoistic humans, Roz is able to establish a kinship with these fundamentally different entities, evoking the most profound ecological themes. Our sense of kinship with non-human animals should be obvious: the bass note of our responsibility to protect and honour the natural world. But should we prepare for kinship with these artificial entities? And should we ask whether casting them in humanoid form lays in more trouble than it's worth? Edinburgh's stickle brick frog is made from gel, wobbly but ready for its limited tasks. It may be a more tractable robot than the gleaming Optimals marching – or we may still hope, shuffling – out of Silicon Valley.
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- General
- Yahoo
Aussie renter's 250 million-year-old discovery in inner-city backyard
An Aussie woman has made an astonishing ancient discovery in the backyard of her inner-city rental home. During one particularly rainy day earlier this month, the Sydney renter noticed an 'unusual' pattern emerge on a large, heavy rock propped up in her garden. 'It was quite dirty so it wasn't until it washed off a bit that I went 'oh, it's got something on it',' the woman, who wished to remain anonymous, told Yahoo News. Intrigued by the intricate detail 'all over' the chunk of sandstone, she decided to take a photo. 'Then I realised it was a fossil,' she said, adding she believes the owner of the property must have placed it there after 'digging out' an old cellar on the property. Although she has never ventured inside the 'scary' underground room, the woman said her partner had spotted an 'original stove' inside. Seeking answers about what could have created the pattern on the huge stone, the curious resident sought help from Aussie fossickers online. 'I thought it was plants, but apparently it is a sea creature,' she said after being inundated with responses. 🍄 Woman's 'smelly find sprouting from backyard lawn 🏊 Tragic find at bottom of backyard pool prompts urgent plea Ancient discovery near popular Aussie camping spot sparks delight After reviewing images of the rock, palaeontologist Sally Hurst and members of the Fossil Club of Australia confirmed to Yahoo the 'great find' is at least 250 million years old. The clusters of fine lines seen on the stone were created by 'a group of animals known as Bryozoa, which are simple aquatic invertebrates that we still have today', she explained. 'This one in particular is called Fenestella. It's from the mid-Permian, so before the dinosaurs, at around 272 to 259 million years old!' Hurst, from Macquarie University, told Yahoo the fossil is likely from the Fenestella Shale Member exposed at Mulbring Quarry in the Hunter Valley. 'So not originally from Sydney or the cellar of the property, but slightly further afield,' she said. 'It's a beautiful specimen, and quite a common find from that area.' While they are found around the world, in Australia fossilised Fenestella is primarily seen in the Sydney Basin and the NSW's South Coast. They are not as commercially valuable as some other fossils, but can be precious to scientists and collectors. Do you have a story tip? Email: newsroomau@ You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube.
Scoop
2 days ago
- Politics
- Scoop
Federated Farmers Welcomes Freshwater Regulations Review
Press Release – Federated Farmers Federated Farmers will be reading through the detail of todays announcement and going back to the Government with our position, on behalf of our members, in the next few weeks. Federated Farmers applauds the Government's announcements today on a comprehensive review of freshwater regulations. 'We're pleased to see all options are on the table and that consultation will be open until 27 July,' Federated Farmers freshwater spokesperson Colin Hurst says. 'The previous Government's freshwater rules were completely unworkable for farmers. In some cases, even if you converted a whole catchment to native forest, you still wouldn't have achieved the bottom lines. 'The current Government simply had to push pause on these rules – and now we're seeing steps towards more sensible national direction to local authorities.' Hurst says it's particularly welcome that the Government wants a more balanced approach to Te Mana o Te Wai. 'That concept, as pursued by the previous Government, has been unworkable and highly problematic. 'It was unclear how councils should interpret and apply what was a vague concept of protecting the mana and mauri of water under Labour's rules, and what that might mean for our farms and rural communities.' Under Te Mana o te Wai, the health and wellbeing of water is put ahead of all other considerations, including human health, and social, cultural and economic wellbeing. 'That seems wildly imbalanced. The Government's announcements today recognise such a strict hierarchy is flawed.' The consultation document says: 'Multiple objectives require councils to provide for multiple outcomes and can better reflect the interests of all water users.' 'Federated Farmers absolutely agrees with this. In fact, we believe it's worth considering whether Te Mano o te Wai is a concept that should be scrapped altogether, which is one of the options now on the table,' Hurst says. Another big question is whether it's worth making these freshwater changes right now under the current Resource Management Act (RMA), or if this should wait until the Government has reformed the RMA, with the freshwater changes to follow. 'Federated Farmers will be reading through the detail of today's announcement and going back to the Government with our position, on behalf of our members, in the next few weeks.'
