YOU SAID IT! Questions raised about Marina plans

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Daniel Charles

There's no acceptable risk. Educate the idiots and there won't be an issue.

Rosie Wang

People!! There are swimming pools! There are netted areas on the beaches. Humans are awful - because when we want to do something - just kill all the local wildlife - kill the crocs so we can swim in a river estuary? Kill the sharks so we can swim in the sea? Kill the jellyfish, Kill the koalas in the trees so we can build houses, kill the dingoes so we don't have to see wild dogs which might bite us. How about humans not feeling they have a right to obliterate nature and start to co-exist and understand how to do this safely.

Bob Dixon

Education not Annihilation.

Elizabeth Chai

Education not eradication! Humans have moved to croc country and need to accept that crocs live in the waterways. There are plenty of natural and man made safe swimming holes with zero croc risk. Anyways the majority of people don’t even leave their sofas these days - keyboard warriors demanding nature bend to them whilst never getting out amongst it or protecting it.

Suede Varrica

Culling is not exterminating. It's calculated control of population. We do need to educate people and learn from our mistakes made in the past were we recklessly killed them and do better by regulating the numbers culled etc. Its Not rocket science. People's safety needs priority.

Bev Rosignolli

While I’m not advocating culling, my sister in law will tell you that 60-odd years ago they would swim at Newell in the river.

Steve Pollard

Culling to acceptable risk would be easy to achieve in the Barron River Cairns and would open up the community facility of Lake Placid again to the public. No need or amenity to the urban Crocs in Cairns community.

David White

People keep sighting swimming with impunity and seldom seeing a croc growing up. There lies the generational gap in knowledge. There is no one around who experienced the natural croc population pre 1930 pre unregulated hunting times, using the reference point of the ‘70s is where the problem is.

This is not an occurrence of overpopulation now but reflects the scarcity of these animals in a time of an unnatural situation then, the tragic result of unregulated hunting.

This led to the decline of 95 per cent of the croc population Australia wide. This was after the second World War, men wanting jobs, skins worth money and relaxed gun laws. Nowadays wild skins are worth nothing as the animals are farmed, we can’t go to the corner store and buy a gun. We have gun laws and probably more importantly this is QLD alone wanting this.

Before it was an Australia wide cull. Crocs swim 1000s of km. They will come from NT, WA, Cape York and nearby countries such as PNG. All scientists and scientific papers and history show that unless we kill them all then culling doesn’t make it safer. It increases complacency and complacency is the killer. Just like this headline promising a return of safe swimming. Australia has a terrible extinction record so we aren’t going to make them extinct, furthermore NT and WA aren’t going to kill their crocs.

There is no fence around Qld. Crocs are perfectly designed ambush predators and have the most incredible ability to remain undetected, it’s impossible to know if one is there. So unfortunately those times have passed. But we still have plenty of places to swim and we can camp, fish and enjoy paradise by a slight modification of our behaviour.

We have the best croc wise education in the world that’s been proven to increase safety. Every year this comes up culling crocs but we already do, crocs are killed every year around here, the department kills / removes all “ problem crocs “ and all those in zero tolerance zones, however they maintain that doesn’t increase safety as another will come, next day, next week , next year.

They say they can’t promise safety because they can’t. The media spread hysteria and politicians divert from pressing issues and unite in a common enemy, the croc, divide communities and turn people on each other. But this has nothing to do with if you love or hate crocs. It’s simply in all scientific research culling doesn’t increase safety.