General News
5 August, 2021
Croc report credibility is questioned
KENNEDY MP, Bob Katter, has slammed a Queensland Government report released late last week which claims the crocodile population has survived “near extinction” and has only grown by 2 percent annually, a figure Mr Katter dismisses as being an offence to the intellect of the people that live in crocodile country.
“These people, they don’t have any intellectual respect, they shot that to pieces long ago,” Mr Katter said.
“Their value systems are positively scary; they want all creatures protected except a species called Homo sapiens.
“If you know crocs, then you know that an average crocodile lays around 55 eggs a year. But when you remove all the predators, those numbers are logically going to explode.
“I’ve seen the late Eddie Holroyd, a proud First Australian, raid a crocodile nest and it was unbelievable to watch him take the 50 eggs, holding the mother at bay while he was doing it.
“If you’re going to start fooling around with nature, you better know what you are doing. You removed all the predators because by far and away, the biggest predator was man – not only the First Australians raiding the nests, but later the crocodile hunters who were seen to be doing a great service.
“So now you’ve taken the predators out and you have unbalanced nature. What would be peculiar is if the numbers weren’t exploding, especially if the number of babies a crocodile can have each year is over 50. “
Mr Katter said many northern fishermen are telling him anecdotes that the gropers are all but gone as they’ve been eaten by the crocs.
“There are the people who know the sea and the reef intimately up here, and they are saying the gropers ate the box jellyfish and Irukandji and so because the crocs have eaten all the gropers, the increase in those dangerous jellyfish has exploded as well.”
Mr Katter said, “They keep quoting a figure that only eight people have been taken in 36 years. Well no, this relates to only eight people that were “seen” to be taken, but how many people have vanished in the last 40-50 years – I say well over 100. And whilst not all are attributed to crocodile attacks, a lot of them would be.
“These people have nothing but contempt for their science. They made the very bad mistake of publishing the report on dugong where they claimed in the public arena and got international publicity that the numbers had dropped in half on the Great Barrier Reef. But when you read the report properly, it said the lower reef numbers had dropped, but the upper reef numbers had doubled. They were flagrantly misrepresenting the figures.
“So you don’t need to be Albert Einstein to figure out that if the average female crocodile can have more than 50 babies the numbers will grow and to tell me that there has been a 2 per cent growth in numbers is just insulting my intelligence on a massive scale.
“I will ram it down the throats of the Lilypad Lefties and ringbarking rights, you will have respect for life or you will be condemned as evil.
“They are happy to kill thousands of babies before they are born, they are now killing old people before they die – it’s just another manifestation of the lack of respect for human life and now it’s getting scary.
“The contempt for human life is scaring the hell out of me. This is just pure evil.”
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