Can shooting be an effective management tool for foxes? Preliminary insights from a management programme

Summary Historically, shooting has been a popular method for controlling foxes in Australia, but past research has shown it to be an ineffective method for significantly reducing fox population numbers. These past studies investigated shooting when conducted in isolated, one-off programmes. In more recent years large, coordinated group fox management programmes has become popular in both agricultural and conservation areas. These landscape scale programmes give more chance of long-term respite from predation damage by slowing down the immigration rates of foxes into the culled area. Studies have been conducted investigating the effectiveness of large-scale group fox management programmes that primarily used 1080 baiting as the method of control to protect vulnerable livestock and small animal. This study investigated the potential of a large-scale group programme that used shooting as the main form of control to reduce the impact of fox predation.