A sampling of ‘Kangaroos - Myths and Realities’

Who are the kangaroos?
Kangaroos, wallabies and rat-kangaroos are a diverse group of small, medium and large herbivorous marsupials occupying the terrestrial environment of Australia and New Guinea. The number of species (about 70) greatly outnumbers all the antelope of southern Africa (34) yet most are unrecognised. Of the 50 or so species in Australia, six are extinct and 29 are threatened or in much reduced ranges. Four of the largest species, the eastern and western grey kangaroo, the red kangaroo and the common wallaroo (or euro) are adaptable and wide-ranging. These are the targets of killing for commerce in meat and hides (30 million killed from 1994-2003) and pest management control. The mindset is to treat them collectively as a problem species in spite of significant evolutionary, physiological, ecological and behavioural differences between them. Added to the ‘problem’ are a few wallaby species that are killed under the guise of pest management, especially in Tasmania. Local issues are exaggerated as regional and national issues and all kangaroos and their kind bear the cost of being labelled as problems and pests.

Myth:
The pastoral lobby has claimed ownership of the 'kangaroo problem' through the absurd claim that there have never before been so many kangaroos as now because they have provided them with water.

Reality:
We question why this myth is sustained when we can apparently take thousands of gigalitres of water out of the Murray-Darling system for people and produce, but apparently before pastoralism, kangaroos could not get a drink.

We have five major rivers flowing inland through Queensland to the Lake Eyre basin and a huge grassland now supporting millions of cattle and sheep but kangaroos apparently had nothing to eat and drink until Europeans came along and settled the country.

Amazingly we have been so clever as to create pasture for 105 million sheep and 22 million cattle (2004 ABARE figures) but 20-50 million kangaroos would have starved in the past! Based on dry sheep equivalents (DSE), the standard measure of stocking in Australia, the sheep and cattle herd is equivalent to at least 339 but as many as 1185 million kangaroos depending on the estimate of an average kangaroo’s energy needs.

We argue that looking at the Australian landscape through a livestock manager’s eyes with the need to water thirsty stock and people has distorted any appreciation of the adaptation of kangaroos to frugal use of any water source down to the smallest puddle.

Myth:
Kangaroos are in ‘plague proportions’ and must be controlled to secure a livelihood from pastoralism and mixed farming.

Reality:
Kangaroos if allowed to move freely across the landscape follow the natural system of temporarily exploiting favourable pasture. Domesticated livestock are maintained at high densities on the same pastures all year round. Competition is predominantly within the herds of livestock held at inappropriate densities for too long in the same paddock and not between livestock and kangaroos. Kangaroo numbers in the rangelands follow the run of seasons and increase when forage is abundant and of high quality and decrease through drought. Claims of massive increases are often spurious results of changes in counting technologies. For example, in the western plains of NSW when estimates of numbers are corrected to a common system, there were three recent years of positive trends for red kangaroos (1997, 1998, 2001 ranging from 9-40%) and four years of negative trends (1999, 2000, 2002 and 2003 ranging from -7% down to - 53%!). So we start with 5.3 million red kangaroos in 1997 and end with 2.2 million in 2003 which farmers, graziers and governments claim is a population ‘out of control’! Nationally counts in commercial zones of Queensland, NSW, SA and WA show recent declines of from 9% (western greys), 54% (wallaroos), 55% (red kangaroos) to 63% (eastern greys). The notion of ‘plague proportions’ is propaganda to support kangaroo killing on a massive scale.

Myth:
Kangaroo numbers must be reduced as part of management to reduce ‘total grazing pressure’ and gain consequent environmental benefits (e.g. more vegetation cover and less erosion) and the commercial kangaroo industry is the best means to achieve this.

Reality:
The concept of ‘total grazing pressure’ suits management of livestock which are all of one kind and so exploit a common resource. Native herbivore communities are much more complex and individual species exploit resources in different ways and at different times allowing several species to sustainably use a landscape. Pastoralists and mixed farmers want to use native and feral herbivores as scapegoats to meet government demands to reduce ‘total grazing pressure’ so that they can maintain or increase livestock densities. The benefits of reducing kangaroo numbers are minimal. The commercial kangaroo industry derives no benefit from low kangaroo numbers since this increases their effort (search time) and costs. The industry benefits most from moderate to high numbers of kangaroos with a high return for a low effort.

Myth:
Kangaroos are killed humanely and probably suffer less stress than livestock transported to abattoirs. Killing kangaroos and reducing populations lead to less suffering in drought because fewer individuals need to die.

Reality:
The commercial kangaroo industry follows a ‘code of practice’ which is not monitored at the point of kill but by spot checks of carcases in ‘chillers’. The code of practice is silent on the fate of dependent young-at-foot which have permanently vacated their mother’s pouch but continue to suckle for 4-6 months, dependent on species, until weaned. The young-at-foot have no commercial value and are abandoned to die of starvation or predation. The industry claims these represent a small percentage of the population and hence the welfare problem is minimal but the scale of the industry is so large that the inhumane treatment affects hundreds of thousands of individuals each year. Of the 30 million kangaroos killed between 1994-2003, about 12 million were females and conservatively 25 % had dependent young-at-foot leaving 3 million of the latter abandoned to a cruel and unnecessary death. A sustainable meat and hide industry is achievable through killing males only but in spite of promoting sustainable resource use as the goal of the industry it remains embedded within the livestock industry which wants suppression of a ‘pest’. Claims of reducing suffering in droughts are fatuous. No shooter has the prescience to know when a drought will occur and which individuals are likely to die as a consequence. There is no commercial value to a starved kangaroo so the healthy residual is targeted.

Myth:
If we don’t use our wildlife then we will lose it.

Reality:
A 200 million dollar kangaroo industry based on commerce with meat and hides pales into insignificance against a multi-billion dollar tourism industry with a large high-spending sector interested in nature-based tourism with wildlife as a focal point. We don’t have to kill, eat and wear an animal in a use-once manner to get economic value when there are valuable multi-use alternatives with the living entity. The KANGAROO is indisputably ‘BRAND AUSTRALIA’ and the whole community prospers from its continued presence and use of its fascinating character. We don’t go to Africa to see one wildebeest standing in a sea of grass but to see thousands. When our unpredictable climate and battered landscape allow kangaroos to increase to hundreds if not thousands we have an incomparable asset to exploit as one of the world’s great wildlife experiences.

We are made all the poorer if cheap meat and leather from a denigrated and persecuted animal
which has done nothing more than survive the onslaught of European colonisation and is
too big to hide is the extent of our horizon! Are kangaroos to be the meat equivalent of
the woodchips from our old growth forests? We think not! We need to learn to live with
kangaroos and all their kind and prosper spiritually and commercially in the same way
that we have allowed the bush to intrude into our backyards.