Western Australian Feral Pig Strategy 2020-2025.

The Western Australian Feral Pig Strategy 2020-2025 (this Strategy) outlines the principles of Australian Pest Animal Strategy (APAS) and builds upon the ‘Feral Pig Control Strategy: South-west Western Australia 2015-2020. The Strategy provides guidance to stakeholders on a strategic approach to the management of feral pigs in WA. It describes the principles of effective feral pig management, and sets the goals and priorities that will help improve WA’s ability to deliver economic, environmental and social benefits through improved feral pig management.
The guiding principles for this Strategy are: Feral pigs are managed effectively; decision-making and prioritization is risk-based and informed by evidence; participation of all stakeholders; capacity building; embracement of new technologies and innovation.
The Strategy envisages 7 Goals and several strategies connected to each of the Goals. Goal 1: Feral pig management is collaborative, coordinated and integrated. Connected to this Goal the Strategy encourages to facilitate collaboration between all stakeholders and enable sharing of knowledge, resources and skills; to review and address, wherever possible, legislative, policy, social or cultural barriers that prevent a tenure-blind approach for feral pig management; to build the knowledge, capacity and commitment of all stakeholders to deliver a coordinated, regional scale and tenure-blind approach to feral pig management; to facilitate cooperative and coordinated partnerships between new and existing feral pig management groups and all landholders; to utilise appropriately trained and authorised members of the community, where they can safely, ethically, and productively contribute to feral pig management; to establish and support an advisory group with broad representation from key stakeholder groups to guide feral pig management in WA. Goal 2 requires feral pig management to be innovative, effective and cost-efficient. The Strategy reccomends to quantify the environmental, economic and social impacts of feral pigs in all regions to ensure transparent investment in feral pig management that is prioritised by asset value and region; to set location-specific targets for feral pig control that are evidence-based and recognise the practical limitations of current management techniques and available resources; to establish and support monitoring programs of sufficient scale and intensity to improve evaluation of the effectiveness of feral pig management activities; to develop, apply and evaluate innovative new management techniques; etc. Goal 3 aims that feral pig management is adequately resourced and ongoing; to achieve this the Strategy requires an investigation on ongoing and stable funding streams (both government and privately owned land) and to ensure that public funding directed towards feral pig management remains accountably linked to strategic forward plans, whilst retaining capacity for adaptive management. Goal 4: Reporting mechanisms support effective feral pig management and facilitate stakeholder engagement. Goal 5: Feral pig management is undertaken to the highest animal welfare standards and complies with all relevant legislation Strategy (improve compliance). Goal 6: Effectively manage illegal activities impeding feral pig management, such as prosecuting those who engage in illegal hunting, deliberate translocation of feral pigs or willful disruption of lawful feral pig management activities. Goal 7: The Western Australian public is supportive of feral pig management Strategy.