There are moments in wildlife care when the ground shifts beneath you, not because of something you have witnessed directly, but because of something you are finally required to sit with, such as a document or a number buried in a government release that quietly rearranges how you understand the system you operate within.
This was one of those moments.
I had been researching the process for applying for a property protection permit through NRE Tasmania. It was practical research, prompted by information I had become aware of regarding a possum cull on a commercial agricultural property. I was not looking to make accusations. I wanted clarity. I wanted to understand what approvals existed, what thresholds were applied, and whether non lethal measures were genuinely considered before lethal control was authorised.
In the course of that research, I returned to a previously released Right to Information document published by NRE themselves. It included tables summarising the number of native animals authorised for lethal control, and the numbers reported as taken, under the property protection permit system.
I read the document multiple times to confirm that I was interpreting the figures and their context correctly.
Between 2013 and 2019, and extending into more recent years through subsequent reporting, millions of native animals were reported as killed in Tasmania under property protection permits.
That realisation settled heavily, not as shock, but as recognition of a system whose consequences had always existed and were now rendered impossible to look away from.
That is the contradiction at the heart of wildlife care in Tasmania.
We are licensed to save them. Others are licensed to kill them. Both sit under the same system. Somewhere in between are the animals themselves.
Wildlife carers are required to register with NRE Tasmania. We are assessed, trained, audited. We log intakes. We report outcomes. We justify euthanasia decisions. We comply with enclosure standards, release criteria, and biosecurity requirements. We are reminded, often, that native wildlife is a public trust and that our role is one of responsibility, restraint, and accountability. All of that is reasonable. Necessary, even.
Existing alongside that framework, however, is another one that authorises the destruction of native animals on a scale that reflects broader human driven threats to wildlife, operating largely out of public view and framed almost entirely in administrative language.
When you work in wildlife rescue and rehabilitation, those words do not land neutrally. They land with weight. Because the species named in those permits are not abstract. They are the same wallabies we pull from roadsides. The same possums we warm in pouches. The same animals we fight to stabilise, rehabilitate, and return to the wild. They are individuals with injuries, stress responses, and histories. They are not interchangeable units.
What shifted this from a vague unease into something far heavier was when I began reading the numbers themselves. The document I found was not advocacy material. It was not commentary. It was administrative data released by NRE Tasmania under the Right to Information framework and published publicly on their website. This is the same department that licences wildlife carers, oversees our compliance, and administers the property protection permit system.
The most recent publicly available take return data for permits with a return period due in 2024 can be found here: https://nre.tas.gov.au/Documents/PPP%20data%202024.pdf
This document was published by NRE Tasmania on 21 August 2025 and reports take return data received as of 12 August 2025. While the data relates to permit activity during calendar year 2024, take returns are submitted after permit expiry and may be received and consolidated well into the following year. According to that report, a total of 633,953 native animals were reported as taken under property protection permits with returns due in 2024 alone.
That figure includes, among others, 280,514 Bennett’s wallabies, 217,412 Tasmanian pademelons, 119,606 brushtail possums, 5,238 Forester kangaroos, 3,881 sulphur crested cockatoos, and 2,664 black swans, with additional species including wombats, ducks, rosellas, native hens and other birds making up the remainder of the total.
These are “reported take returns”, meaning they are figures submitted back to NRE Tasmania by permit holders following lethal control activities. They are not quota ceilings or population estimates, and they reflect what has been reported within the permit return framework rather than unrecorded outcomes beyond it.
Looking beyond a single year, the scale becomes even more confronting.
A third party consolidation of Tasmanian Right to Information permit data covering the period from 1 July 2013 to 6 June 2022 reports that approximately 10,420,536 native animals were reported as taken under protection permits during that time. That summary, drawn directly from RTI material, can be viewed at: https://www.creativecowboyfilms.tv/earth/how-many-tasmania-protection-permits-to-kill-australian-wildlife
In total, more than ten million individual native animals were reported as killed in Tasmania in less than a decade.
The same species that wildlife carers are licensed to rescue, rehabilitate, and release. The same animals we name, monitor, and fight for when they arrive injured or orphaned.
More recent media reporting based on government permit data has shown that 675,640 native animals were reported as taken under property protection permits in 2023 alone, and that between 2021 and 2023 the total reported take was almost 2.5 million animals. These figures have been reported using RTI sourced data and official permit returns, including coverage by The Examiner.
Reading these figures as a wildlife carer is not the same as reading them as a policy analyst.
For carers, these are not population units or variables used to measure browsing or grazing pressure. They are individuals of species we spend our lives trying to keep alive long enough to return to the wild. Seeing those same species appear in tables by the hundreds of thousands exposes a deep disconnect.
That disconnect is not confined to wildlife carers. It has begun to surface more publicly as national analyses have examined the scale of licensed wildlife killing across Australia. In public commentary responding to Humane Society International Australia’s 2024 report, Licence to Kill, Greens MP Tabatha Badger stated that Tasmania “allows more killing of native wildlife than anywhere else in Australia”.
The Licence to Kill report provides critical national context for that statement. Drawing on government data from multiple jurisdictions, it documents how permit based killing has become a routine management tool rather than a genuine last resort, with Tasmania consistently emerging as an outlier in both scale and frequency. What the report outlines at a national level is reflected, in granular detail, within Tasmania’s own Right to Information data.
The RTI figures do not contradict this analysis. They explain how it is possible.
Humane Society International Australia (2024), Licence to Kill: The shocking scale of licensed wildlife killing in Australia https://hsi.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Web-Single_HSI-Australia_Licence-to-Kill-Report.pdf
At this point, the language of management begins to feel inadequate.
Property protection permits are framed as a response to wildlife browsing or grazing impacts, particularly in agricultural settings. Lethal control authorised through permits does not exist in isolation, but sits alongside poisoning and rodenticide use that is similarly justified as necessary management rather than acknowledged as harm.
They are justified on the basis of damage mitigation and economic protection. It is important to acknowledge that agricultural impacts are real and that farmers operate under genuine pressure. Wildlife carers are not blind to that reality.
But when lethal control becomes routine, large scale, and repeated year after year, the question stops being whether damage exists and starts being whether the system has defaulted to a single solution.
When numbers reach into the hundreds of thousands annually and the millions cumulatively, it is reasonable to ask whether lethal control is genuinely treated as a last resort, or whether it has become administratively normalised. That is not a radical question. It is a reasonable, ethical one.
Permit frameworks generally require applicants to demonstrate that non lethal measures have been considered or attempted. Yet when lethal outcomes occur at such scale, it is fair to ask how consistently those alternatives are implemented, monitored, and supported. Exclusion fencing, habitat modification, deterrents and crop protection strategies all exist. Some are expensive. Some are imperfect. Killing is also imperfect.
From a conservation perspective, cumulative take matters. Wildlife populations do not experience permits one property at a time. They experience the total pressure exerted across landscapes and seasons. When multiple neighbouring properties operate under permits simultaneously, impacts can compound. Yet permit assessments are often conducted on a case by case basis, with limited public visibility of broader regional effects.
For someone working within the wildlife care system, this creates profound dissonance.
On one side, we are required to justify every animal we take into care. To demonstrate necessity. To record outcomes. To prove that intervention is warranted and humane. On the other, the same regulatory environment allows lethal control at scales that would be unthinkable in a rehabilitation context.
This is not hypocrisy on the part of carers. It is moral clarity in an imperfect system.
The fact that we continue to do the work does not mean we believe the system is fair. It means the individual animal in front of us still matters. Even when millions are lost elsewhere, saving one life is not meaningless.
This does not mean that wildlife rescue is ineffective. It means that wildlife rescue exists alongside a system that permits extensive loss elsewhere. Carers step into the gaps left by policy decisions and respond to consequences rather than intentions, whether that harm arises from permits, poisoning, or injured wildlife on our roads.
This does not mean the system should remain unexamined.
Transparency matters. Accountability matters. Honest discussion about whether current permit frameworks align with stated conservation goals matters. Asking whether lethal control has become the default response matters. None of this is anti farmer or anti regulation. It is pro coherence.
We can hold multiple truths at once in the context of wildlife conservation, that agriculture matters, that wildlife matters, and that conflict exists between the two. That killing should never be easy, automatic, or invisible. That rescue work is essential and emotionally costly. And that systems governing wildlife must evolve as knowledge, data, and understanding improve.
What the RTI data makes clear is that this conversation can no longer be deferred, minimised, or framed solely in administrative language. If conservation is a stated goal, then it is reasonable to ask whether lethal control has become administratively routine rather than genuinely exceptional.
This is not a call for blame. It is a call for responsibility. It is a call to ask better questions of the systems that govern wildlife, and to expect clearer answers in return. If these figures concern you, then use your voice. Contact your local Member of Parliament. Ask how property protection permits are assessed, monitored, and reviewed. Engage with representatives who are already raising these issues publicly, including Greens MP Tabatha Badger, and ask what reform looks like in practice rather than principle.
The RTI documents do not allow distance or abstraction. They record outcomes, not intentions. They represent animals that were authorised to be killed, reported as taken, and entered into spreadsheets as completed actions. Tomorrow the phone will ring again, and another animal will need help, not as a statistic but as a living body in distress.
We will answer that call, not because the system is fair, but because the animal still matters.
Our work sits in the uncomfortable space between care and loss, hope and reality, and it requires us to respond to outcomes rather than intentions. We do this work because someone has to stand with the animals when the system does not, and because questioning that system is not a betrayal of our role, but the clearest expression of it.
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