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Unfrtunately I missed seeing it, but here is some info.

http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/sixtyminutes/stories/2004_05_30/story_1130.asp

TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE.

Transcript: Croc hunters
May 30, 2004
Reporter: Charles Wooley
Producer: Hamish Thomson

INTRO â€” PETER OVERTON: They're perfect, so perfect their design hasn't changed all that much in the last 200 million years. The crocodile is a great survivor, still one of the most fearsome and efficient predators on earth. But up north in the Territory, there's a new and very creative croc conservation campaign. So creative that it's sure to cause an almighty environmental stoush and end in a few crocodile tears. Why? Well, as Charles Woolley reports, it's a kind of shoot-them-to-save-them scheme and it involves inviting rich trophy hunters to pay top dollar for the privilege.

STORY â€” CHARLES WOOLEY: It's like opening a hard-boiled egg.

PROF GRAHAM WEBB: Exactly.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Isn't that amazing? Isn't that amazing? I have given birth, or assisted at the birth, of a crocodile. I'm in Professor Graham Webb's nursery and I'm overcome with the joys of parenthood. This is something you don't get to do every day. These little hatchlings may look cute, but from the moment they are born, they are hard-wired to kill. Crocodiles are one of the most formidable creatures on earth, supreme ambush predators. They've been around 200 million years and they've been eating humans since first we ventured onto the nearest riverbank.

PROF GRAHAM WEBB: In all the old books, they were the arch enemy, you know, "Throw them to the crocodiles!" They are a water's-edge predator. They are designed to see things, dive, come under water, come up right next to them and then "boof", up they go. They are very successful.

CHARLES WOOLEY: No-one admires crocodiles more than Graham Webb. Based in Darwin, he's one of Australia's foremost authorities on these fearsome reptiles.

PROF GRAHAM WEBB: What makes a crocodile the successful animal they are is that their head is all designed like a submarine.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Graham is also a maverick. For 30 years, crocodile hunting has been banned in the Top End and numbers have exploded. Now he's proposing a radical solution: lift the ban and promote safaris for big-game hunters who'll pay up to $30,000 to bag a croc.

PROF GRAHAM WEBB: This issue is about, heaven forbid, Australia is going to say, "We have hunting". Well, whoopy-do! You know, every other country has hunting too. If you really want to go hunting, go to Europe, go to England or go to all the other countries where there's hunting. Hunters have been around forever. There's nothing wrong with hunting, it's a wonderful, wonderful thing.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Professor Webb's unconventional beliefs in wildlife management are based on years of research, much of it here in the McKinley River in remote Arnhem Land.

PROF GRAHAM WEBB: You wouldn't want to go swimming here. You're not going to make it, it's that simple.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Ours is a long day's journey into darkness. Graham is heading up river with a small scientific team, as he's done hundreds of times before. The object, to catch and tag a croc. Once on board, the painstaking job of measuring and tagging the crocodile begins. This young male will also have a radio device mounted on its back to track its movements. What all this monitoring tells Professor Webb is, since crocodiles were banned in 1971, numbers have returned to levels unseen for 200 years.

PROF GRAHAM WEBB: Crocodiles in the Northern Territory have recovered to, as far as we can tell, the numbers in densities that were there historically, in first settlement. And you can go down rivers in the dry season, in the cool, and crocodiles are peeling off banks, like in the Tarzan movies. Now, you can't do any better than that.

CHARLES WOOLEY: And with the explosion in numbers, comes more attacks and more pressure to declare these animals pests.

PROF GRAHAM WEBB: Most attacks by crocodiles are really misadventure, nothing more.

CHARLES WOOLEY: They are nothing personal in this, they are just hungry.

PROF GRAHAM WEBB: Just hungry, just hungry and there's some flailing human in the water, splash, splash, splash, splash. Boof!

CHARLES WOOLEY: Graham speaks from personal experience. He was attacked back in the '80s while stealing eggs from a crocodile nest, but he insists his support of hunting is based on sound principles of conservation, not revenge. He believes that unless crocodiles are worth something to landowners, they simply won't want such dangerous animals around.

PROF GRAHAM WEBB: They'll eat your kids, they'll eat your cows, they eat your dogs. If they are not worth money to people today, people aren't going to put up with it. Make conservation profitable and you are not going to have to push people to conserve things, they'll push you.

NICOLA BEYNON, HUMANE SOCIETY INTERNATIONAL: This is about the great, white trophy hunter coming over from Germany and the US to shoot Australian wildlife for the sheer hell of it, for pleasure, not for food, for pleasure, and that's a very grizzly niche market that I really don't think Australians want to pander to. I think most Australians are absolutely appalled at the idea of trophy hunting.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Nicola Beynon is an animal rights activist with the Humane Society International, one of many groups lobbying the Federal Government to reject Professor Webb's controversial scheme.

NICOLA BEYNON: Let's not forget that it wasn't so long ago that crocodiles were an endangered species and they were endangered because of hunting. The only reasons that those populations have recovered now is because they were protected.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Up in the Territory the idea of trophy hunting is not new. It's already happening with buffalo. European hunters are prepared to pay thousands of dollars to trophy-shoot one of these feral animals. This is happening at Bullo River Station, a 2000-square-kilometre cattle property and ecotourism business in the East Kimberley.

MARLEE RANACHER: We are in one of the world's last untouched pristine environments. Oh, you are a little bit of a trouble maker, you are.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Bullo is run by Marlee Ranacher and her Austrian husband Franz. She's the daughter of the legendary Sara Henderson, whose books introduced a generation of city people to the hardships of the northern bush.

A lot of people have trouble with trophy shooting and see it as barbaric.

MARLEE RANACHER: Yes, I can understand that. I think these people possibly have had no experience in shooting and in hunting. The majority of people who hunt have ethics and morals and they do it properly, they do it humanely.

CHARLES WOOLEY: The new generation at Bullo have permission to trap problem crocs for their leather. They were granted the licence because numbers had skyrocketed and the crocodiles were killing hundreds of cattle every year. One croc skin alone is worth more than 20 head of cattle, but trophy hunting is even more lucrative.

I'm a rich American tourist, what am I prepared to pay to shoot him?

MARLEE RANACHER: $15,000 for a trophy croc and the bigger they get, the more, because obviously they become a little bit rarer.

CHARLES WOOLEY: In a moment you are going to shoot him.

MARLEE RANACHER: Yes.

CHARLES WOOLEY: That will upset some people. That's really what this is all about.

MARLEE RANACHER: Upsetting people? Well, as long as we keep the levels down and we are not harming the status quo of the breeding, I think it's well worth it.

NICOLA BEYNON: This is going to be tourists and it could be someone that's never shot an animal before who will be allowed to get out there with a harpoon and a gun. So we have enormous animal welfare concerns, too.

CHARLES WOOLEY: We are quite probably talking about the Philadelphia dentist, but he'll be accompanied by an expert shot, of course.

NICOLA BEYNON: But the person who's doing the shooting is what counts when it comes to the suffering the animal will face.

PROF GRAHAM WEBB: I just don't like anywhere in the world where people from the outside come in, like a bunch of colonialists, and start dictating how other people's lives are going to be, based on their crappy standards.

CHARLES WOOLEY: While hunting crocodiles remains illegal in the Top End, somewhat paradoxically there's a thriving legal trade in their leather. Eggs are collected in the wild and the young hatchlings raised in captivity until they are ready for the tannery. But first, you have to get the eggs from a crocodile-infested swamp.

What are the oars for?

PROF GRAHAM WEBB: They are what you use. This is your best defence.

CHARLES WOOLEY: An oar against a crocodile?

PROF GRAHAM WEBB: This is just to shoot you if the croc gets you. There are some things that seem like sheer folly.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Robbing a crocodile nest must be first among them.

PROF GRAHAM WEBB: There it is, Charlie, have a look at them.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Look at the size of it!

PROF GRAHAM WEBB: It's huge, isn't it? It's a big nest really, a real big nest.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Meaning?

PROF GRAHAM WEBB: Little crocodiles don't make big nests, that's just a bit of a theory, you know.

CHARLES WOOLEY: I'm trying not to scare myself, but within what sort of radius of us is this dirty great crocodile.

PROF GRAHAM WEBB: The crocodile is probably within four metres of us, under here somewhere.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Oh, Jesus! We should do this quickly.

PROF GRAHAM WEBB: Yeah.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Get the eggs and let's go!

Armed with my oar, I'm on point duty while the mad professor slowly gathers about 50 eggs.

PROF GRAHAM WEBB: Beautiful. Beautiful.

CHARLES WOOLEY: This is not a place to bugger around, is it?

PROF GRAHAM WEBB: She'll probably stay under for 20 minutes or something.

CHARLES WOOLEY: That's how long she can hold her breath?

PROF GRAHAM WEBB: Yes.

CHARLES WOOLEY: She doesn't know what we are doing yet, does she?

PROF GRAHAM WEBB: No, she might get angry.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Can we tag him and call him Charlie?

PROF GRAHAM WEBB: We can call the whole clutch Charlie, if you want.

CHARLES WOOLEY: I'd be honoured.

Back at Graham Webb's commercial crocodile farm, the hatchlings come snapping into the world.

What's young Charlie's future here?

PROF GRAHAM WEBB: In the end, Charlie will probably end up as a handbag. His meat will be eaten.

CHARLES WOOLEY: That's a bit sad.

PROF GRAHAM WEBB: It's better than being eatenâ€¦

CHARLES WOOLEY: Better than the other way around!

The Northern Territory wetlands are a priceless Australian asset. To preserve its unique inhabitants like the saltwater crocodiles, it may be necessary to try some radical new ideas, even if they are extremely contentious ones. Giving wildlife an economic value, putting a price on its head, makes sense up here, but it might be hard to sell in the cities of the south.

NICOLA BEYNON: It would be the thin end of the wedge. It's something we want to leave behind in the last century, the idea of the great white hunter. It's not a practice for today in Australia.

PROF GRAHAM WEBB: We've got a totally unique situation up here because crocodiles generate all sorts of benefits, economic benefits, social benefits, cultural benefits. They're a win-win situation. If we lose that, we lose the crocodiles.

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John aka NitroX

...
Govt get out of our lives NOW!
"I love the smell of cordite in the morning."
"A Sharp spear needs no polish"