Almost six million Australians died in 1999…

Now there’s a bulletin that would make quite a stir on the nightly news. The Australians in question are kangaroos, not humans, however, so the true story of Australia’s war on wildlife wouldn’t likely make your local Eyewitness News.

Each year, Australian ‘roo shooters’ are given the government’s blessing to kill several million kangaroos - the very mammals pictured as the country’s national emblem and emblazoned on the tail of every QANTAS jet. Millions more die illegally. The approved quotas for the Australian states has allowed the 1999 slaughter to reach a staggering 5, 668, 416 kangaroos.

It is like going back 100-150 years to an America where birds were slaughtered to make feathered hats and millions of bison were wiped out to make rugs and robes. Wholesale, deliberate, slaughter of wildlife for commercial purposes on this scale just doesn’t happen any more - except in Australia.

These grim industry statistics mean kangaroos are arguably the victims of the largest commercial slaughter of wildlife occurring anywhere. This is not just an Australian concern, however. America and the rest of the world are partly responsible, for hides and meat of the animals killed are exported to use around the world.

And for such useful products, too. Kangaroo paws are made into bottle openers, and stuffed heads into wall mounts. In the orient, you can buy “the Golden Ball Purse,” a small coin purse made from a kangaroo’s scrotum. In England, golfers can pay to sport a furry, fuzzy natural hide golf bag. In Germany and other parts of Europe, people have developed a taste for kangaroo meat. Italians make shoes from the leather. Americans wear these and other leather products made from kangaroo, often without knowing it. The hides are desired for the softness of the leather and there is the added advantage of no expensive feeding costs before slaughter. Never mind the extreme cruelty to many millions of wild animals or the mismanagement of wildlife for great financial gain. All of us, not just Australians, are part of the problem .

Kangaroos have been persecuted and exploited since Europeans arrived in Australia. By the early 1970’s the grisly, unsupervised slaughter of kangaroos had reached such a high, and kangaroo populations had reached such lows, that public outcry forced official recognition of the problem.

The driving force behind the overexploitation of kangaroos had been the growing US market for kangaroo leather goods. With a U.S. import ban on kangaroo products in 1974, the kangaroo industry languished and kangaroo populations recovered.A trial lifting of the ban in 1981 stirred the stagnating kangaroo industry to renewed levels of killing.

In 1983, the Animal Protection Institute of America called for a public hearing and presented testimony to dismiss the Australian Government's petition to de-list the three commonly-killed species. The Nichols Report raised anew the spectre of de-listing. We find it particularly troublesome that API’s written and oral comments from the 1983 hearing are not mentioned as valid points of information in the Nichols Report.

We take exception to the unsubstantiated comment in the Nichols Report (page one, paragraph two of the Executive Summary) which states there a will be some kind of “conservation benefit of approved harvest of kangaroos”.

Granted, this is the standard rationale underlying the killing of these animals, and countless other animals around the globe, but saying it does not prove the feeble principle of wildlife management that animals are in any way benefited when humans kill them.

Management by the bullet might be politically expedient and offer temporary relief to land-users, but do the various species of kangaroos being “harvested” ever benefit from the slaughter? More often, a case can be made that wildlife populations, faced with many natural obstacles to survival, are seriously disrupted by this type of human intervention.

The Nichols Report admits that the Australian government does not regulate the taking of kangaroos, only the export of kangaroo products. This is because the Australian federal government is incapable of regulating the annual kill. Quotas are set by the individual states, subject to internal political pressure from agricultural interests.

At the time of the 1983 hearings in Washington, D.C. Rawlinson noted that claims by the Australian government that some 30 million kangaroos existed in that country were twice an actual figure of 14-16 million. He questioned the accuracy of the government’s population statistics.

We doubt that law enforcement has been improved in the decade since that report. Nevertheless, the FWS team visiting Australia, concluded that: “Due to excellent protective legislation…the three species of kangaroos are not likely to become endangered in the foreseeable future. Consideration should be given to removing them from the list of threatened species protected by the Endangered Species Act.”

The Nichols report, however, does mention the illegal take of kangaroos. Rawlinson had pointed out that at least one million kangaroos are killed by the livestock industry as cheap means to feed their working dogs.

The kangaroo management plans only seem to provide statistics for justifying an ongoing commercial slaughter of millions of kangaroos to minimise alleged forage competition with sheep and damage to crops. The Nichols report reiterates, without substantiation, the claim that great agricultural damage is attributable to kangaroos.

Earlier reports (e.g. Fowlers’s Gap Conservation Committee, October 1972) minimise this overlap, stating, “It has been found that roos prefer a grass diet while sheep prefer saltbush, so there is virtually no conflict between them” Graeme Caughley, an Australian biologist, stated that “ Where wheat crops are grown, it usually means the end of the animal.” (kangaroo)

Over the ensuing years, the unjustified slaughter of kangaroos has continued with the Australian State and Federal governments’ bureaucrats and scientists lobbying the U.S. government to de-list the kangaroo from the U.S. threatened species list and effective on April 10, 1995, they finally succeeded:

United States Federal Register Vol 60, No 46, March 9, 1995 Rules and Regulations Under pressure from both agricultural and business lobbies, Australian state wildlife managers would like to have it both ways - controlling kangaroos as “pests” by “harvesting” them as a “resource”. This double-barrelled approach means suffering, death and the eventual disappearance of kangaroos from much of the Australian landscape.