Smitten by Giraffe by Anne Innis Dagg

Author:Anne Innis Dagg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2016-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Kangaroo Controversy

In 1983, following the appearance of a film called Goodbye Joey, I wrote an article for Animal Kingdom called “Kangaroo Controversy.” The film was about kangaroos in Australia becoming extinct because they were being shot for their meat and described the cruelty of their killers (Dagg 1984d). It was a bizarre debate between pro-animal groups who wanted to stop the cruelty of shooting kangaroos by claiming they were being wiped out and ranchers who were being driven into poverty by the thousands of roos on their huge properties in the outback. The outcome would have a huge effect, as it would determine whether America, which bought much of this meat, would reaffirm that the ban it had earlier placed on kangaroo products should remain lifted.

I was conflicted about the article because, although I didn’t want roos shot, they obviously were not endangered. While driving around backcountry Australia in 1982, during my husband’s third sabbatical, Mary and I had seen at least one kangaroo road kill per mile, even though traffic was almost non-existent. At one of our campsites a roo swiped a piece of cucumber from my plate of food, and I had a pushing match with another to keep it from crowding into our small tent, where it probably thought there would be more edibles.

People I contacted for the article agreed heartily that kangaroos did not face extinction. Beatrice Storie, who lived on a 57,000 acre ranch in Queensland, had found her property swarming with about 8,500 kangaroos during a drought; meanwhile, her cattle and sheep had to have food shipped in for them at huge expense. Storie wrote me that if all the “Save the Kangaroo” people gave 50 cents a week for each kangaroo, she would gladly get rid of her sheep and cattle; this would have been a form of agistment, a word that means paying rent for having one’s livestock fed and looked after. At the time, when the roos had reached plague proportions, owners hired shooters to cull the largest animals and sell the meat and hides.

When I contacted Dr Geoff Sharman from Macquarie University about this problem, he explained that Australia is an arid zone country with rangelands rather than an agricultural program. Large kangaroos became common after the increase in grasslands and water sources by ranchers but only during droughts did kangaroos concentrate near human-constructed water sources, to the detriment of the cattle and sheep, so that ranchers felt compelled to shoot them to save their businesses. Sharman noted that killing large kangaroos at least brought some balance to the ecosystem and helped preserve smaller marsupials, although he believed that getting rid of feral nonnative donkeys, horses, camels, goats, pigs, cats, and rats would actually be far more beneficial to both domestic and native species.

Almost all Australians were against the cruelty to kangaroos, which had been described at length in the media: animals deliberately shot to wound so their flesh would not decompose before the shooters came to finally kill and

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