I have a bone to pick with feral chickens bill

On Friday, Parliament passed a Firearms Amendment Bill. It had been tabled two weeks ago but despite this I believe many members thought the Bill was dealing with the handling of Firearms in relation to ‘pests’ rather than what the Bill was actually  doing.

The Bill allowed the Commissioner of Police to issue annual licences to shoot pests/feral chickens instead of the current licencing programme whereby these licences can only be issued for 60 days. Clearly, this change makes sense as today, feral chickens are a daily challenge for us and thus having to apply for up to six licences each year makes no sense.

However, I was taken aback to realize that the sole purpose of this Bill was only to make this licencing change. Feral chickens are a serious problem. The Minister of the Environment puts the number of feral chickens between 20,000 and 30,000. This is a huge number for an island with a resident population of around 65,000 people. The chickens are everywhere and only a few neighbourhoods are spared their presence.

The chickens are a nuisance to our farming community. They descend upon a field of crops and ravish the field. The loss can be total. Farmers cannot get insurance for crop loss due to feral chickens. Today, we need all the vegetable and other produce that we can grow. We cannot afford to have produce lost in this way.

I would have been most happy if the Minister responsible for the Environment had brought amendments that would have made trapping of feral chickens legal. As well as shooting these animals with air guns, there is no reason why Government can’t encourage people to build traps to capture the chickens.  To encourage people to get involved government should have a bounty for captured chickens and have the bounty offer well known in the island.

Additionally, there should be a plan to increase the number of people shooting these chickens. Presently there are five shooters. There are a healthy number of Police officers and Regiment soldiers who would be more than capable of shooting these chickens.

I would have been happier if the Minister told the House he would be:

1 encouraging an increase in the number of licenced shooters;

2 licencing the trapping of chickens;

3 enriching the current bounty programme to have more people get involved.

I encourage the Minister to come back to the House as soon as possible with a solid plan to address this serious problem. We cannot afford to lose more crops to this large number of feral chickens.