Briony Goodsell's grandpa says kill all crocodiles

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25278021-17001,00.html 

I was at the Farmers Market selling my lamb yesterday in Queen Street Mall, Brisbane when at pack up time I was screaming like a girl when I noticed the possum I was checking out, as it ran toward me, was actually a giant rat.

Then as I sought some light relief last night (after watching Farmer Wants a Wife... let's talk about that later), I was watching on YouTube a guy in Santa Barbara who has a dog with a cat riding it and a rat riding the cat....

It made me laugh that I was so disgusted at a rat, yet here is a bloke living off people photographing his rat on a cat on a dog. Especially after I spent the lonely drive after the markets thinking about the pests I face and how much one has the right to exterminate them. (One bloke at the markets recalled an ABC show that had New Yorkers totally indifferent to living amongst rats).

On my farm I used to exterminate my vermin... shoot and bait foxes, wild dogs and dingoes so they would not rip my baby lambs apart, however, as was natural following on my breeding of a drought tolerant sheep, I thought that it is better not to fight my environment but to work with it. I bought Mareema dogs for my flocks of sheep and have not baited in over six months and seen no evidence of violent deaths to my sheep (at times I was losing up to 40 sheep in dingo attacks a night). The big white dogs protect the sheep just like our domestic dogs protect our families in our homes and yards, thus working with nature not against it.

The dingoes and foxes have to go elsewhere for a feed.. I'm hoping down rabbit holes...

After reading the comments by the grandfather of that most unfortunate little girl in Darwin this morning it truly brought my thoughts into perspective.

What is vermin?

Many of the replying comments to the article focused on them being a wild animal in the wild doing what they should do.

This is fine to say if it's someone else's daughter that is taken and ripped apart by a crocodile. Or someone else who picks up the ripped up lambs after an evening of butchery by a couple of dingoes... but for those who deal with vermin it's a little harder to deal with.

No one can say let all be in nature if, in their own home, they use chemicals and traps to kill mice and cockroaches. After all, are not these animals doing what they do...?

What's your view? Should there be two rules? One for those city dwellers immune from outta town killers, like snakes, sharks, crocs, dingoes or overpopulations of macropods and emus..  But it's fine for them to exterminate out of control neighbour's dogs, rats, mice and roaches.

I'm learning to live with nature... not hypocrisy.