1080 fox baiting and your neighbours

From training to the last sign coming down

The EPA’s guidance reads as a sequence. These are its main steps, not all of them: the guidance and the order’s schedule for the pest you are targeting have the rest. Red marks what neighbours see.

1. Before anythingYou must be trained in using 1080 before you use it. The guidance asks for training in pesticide use at AQF level 3, or Local Land Services’ Vertebrate Pesticide Training course, completed in the past 5 years.
2. Getting the baitsBaits come only from an Authorised Control Officer, and the EPA suggests collecting them as close as you can to when you will lay them.
3. At least 3 days beforeTell every neighbour whose property boundary is within 1 kilometre of where the baits will go. If neighbours cannot be reached in any of the ways the EPA lists, or there are more than 25 of them, they may be told through an advertisement in a local newspaper instead.
4. Before the first baitPut up signs on your property warning that 1080 baits are in use. Check the distances too: the order fixes how near to a property boundary, a habitation, a waterway or a public road a bait may be laid, and no bait may go closer. Those distances are in section 4 of each of the order’s schedules.
5. While baits are on the propertyBaits may be kept on your property only for a time, under the conditions in sections 2 and 3 of the schedule for the pest you are targeting. Keep them locked up, away from children, from food for people or animals, and from seed and fertiliser. Greater Sydney’s regional plan is blunt about dogs: “the risk to domestic dogs is high and owners must confine their dogs and/or control them in public areas to reduce the risk of accidental baiting.”
6. 4 weeks after the last baitThe signs stay up for at least this long after the last day baits are used.
7. Clearing upUntaken baits are buried at least 500 mm deep in a disposal pit on your property, clear of waterways. Containers that held 1080 are triple rinsed and buried; plastic bags may be buried or burnt. As far as you can, recover the carcasses of poisoned animals and bury them as the order’s schedule sets out. Every user also makes and keeps a record of their 1080 use, as Part 4 of the Pesticides Regulation 2017 requires.

Where the order and the label differ

Every 1080 product is a restricted pesticide, the EPA says, because of the risks to the environment, wildlife and domestic animals. Under the order, 1080 bait products may be used only to control wild dogs, foxes, feral pigs or rabbits.

The order also warns that approved labels and APVMA permits do not hold every condition that applies in NSW: users must also follow the schedule for their pest. Where a label or permit says something different from the schedule, the schedule wins, to the extent of the difference.

Foxes where houses are close together

Near houses, the regional plan says, the options for fox control shrink: “Options for controlling foxes are extremely limited in closely settled rural, peri-urban and urban areas due to limitations of control techniques including restrictions outlined in the 1080 PCO.”

The NSW Government’s fox page says the best results come from proactive control as part of a group baiting program, and that the spring breeding season is an effective time. The same page also describes fox-proof fencing for smaller assets such as a chicken coop, which needs maintenance to keep working, and trapping for problem individuals. Trapping has its own law, set out in the notice on trapping and the cruelty law.

The Hills Shire’s spring program

The council buries its baits more than 10 cm down to cut the risk to animals other than foxes, and runs a “free feed” period without poison first: if animals are found visiting a bait station, baiting stops there.

The council’s pesticide notification plan

NSW public authorities, local councils included, must consult their community when they write a pesticide use notification plan, and must tell the community when they intend to use pesticides in the outdoor public places they own or manage, such as parks and reserves. The rules are in Part 5, Division 2 of the Pesticides Regulation 2017.

The Hills Shire’s plan says it was prepared under that Regulation, so that the community knows about pesticide use in outdoor public places the council owns or controls. For the kinds of pesticide use it lists under outdoor recreation areas, the plan says that use within 20 metres of a sensitive place, or affecting people who have registered their interest, will be notified at least 5 working days ahead, by door knock, phone, mail or letterbox drop.