Episode 9, Season 1

Remember earlier in the season, when Dad and I hunted water buffalo in the Northern Territory? We promised you then that there was a second half coming, with even more animals and a deeper insight into the amazing wilderness of the Australian Outback. Well, here it is guys, Part 2 of our Northern Territory adventure.

It is hard to truly fathom how big, remote and unpopulated the Outback is until you are there. Out here, properties are so big, they don’t measure it in acres or hectares; they measure it in square kilometres. And this hunting concession is a whopping 2,200 square kilometres. To put that into perspective, that’s about 220,000 hectares or just over half a million acres. That’s the size of Mauritius. 

When you get lost out here, there are no road signs to point you in the right direction. We didn’t even have a real GPS in the car (though I’m determined to buy myself a Garmin Rhino now). All we had was Jonathan’s ‘GP-Guess’ to find our way back to camp and thankfully, it never let us down. 

The other thing that really gets you out here is how many animals there are compared to humans. 

I know this is a hunting show, not a Maths class, but here are a few facts that might blow your mind: 

• 245,000 people live in the Northern Territory, spread out across 1,420,000km2 – that’s a population density of roughly 0.17 per square kilometre. 
• The Northern Territory government estimates there is between 3 and 6 feral pigs per square kilometre. Even taken at the lower end of the estimate, pigs outnumber humans by roughly 17 to 1. 
• There are over 5 million feral donkeys in the Northern Territory. Animal rights groups have suggested rehoming feral donkeys rather than culling them, but that would require each person in the Northern Territory to take on 20 donkeys each.
• Each donkey also consumes around 2.5 tonnes of food per year. With 5 million donkeys to feed, that’s 12.5 billion tonnes of food that could have gone to feed native wildlife and domestic livestock. 
• Pigs and donkeys are just two of many feral and introduced animals. Others include sambar, rusa and chital deer, camel, feral cattle, buffalo, horse, pigs, goats, cats, wild dogs, fox, rabbits and a number of introduced birds.
• There are so many introduced animals in the Territory that they are having an adverse effect on native wildlife. A recent study into the environmental impacts of feral animals in Kakadu reports that, between 1996 and 2009, while introduced wildlife numbers grew at astronomical rates, native mammal numbers fell by 75 percent. 

The NT needs more hunters to visit, and to help control some of those numbers, as there simply aren’t enough hunters in the Territory alone to do the job alone. 

In this episode, Dad and I made a small dent in the feral numbers, culling some sick and injured buffalo and donkeys, taking out some feral pigs, and getting two massive, angry scrub bulls on the ground.