Shooters to kill 15,000 kangaroos on army base
Date: 20-May-02
Country: AUSTRALIA
Author: Michael Perry
"We expect 15,000 kangaroos can be culled in a matter of months or weeks," Colin Trinder, the defence department's director of environmental stewardship, said last week.
Trinder said professional kangaroo shooters, not soldiers, would begin culling the kangaroos on the 44,000 hectares (109,000 acre) Puckapunyal military training base, 100 km (62 miles) north of Melbourne in tbe next few days.
"There is a code of practice for the killing of kangaroos. Shooters basically shoot the kangaroos in the head or heart and then check that they are dead," Trinder told Reuters.
Trinder said eventually the kangaroo population on Puckapunyal would be reduced to about 40,000 animals. He said all kangaroos killed would be buried on the base in Victoria state.
Australia's main animal welfare body, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), condemned the army for failing to manage the kangaroo population on Puckapunyal over the past 15 years, leaving no choice but to cull.
"The military has 100,000 kangaroos on their property and do not know how to manage them. They have just ignored them and let them breed," said RSPCA national president Hugh Wirth.
Wirth said RSPCA inspectors encountered "horrific scenes" at the base this week with many kangaroos dead or dying of starvation, others tangled in wire fences unable to escape the base which like the rest of Victoria is in a five year drought.
"Native grasses have run out and there is mass starvation. There's corpses of dead kangaroos just lying around. Its a real crisis," Wirth said.
But animal welfare activists say they will try and stop the killings, threatening to stand between shooters and kangaroos.
"We are definitely organising ourselves - we will be out there and if the kangaroos are going to be shot we will try to protect them," Animal Active spokeswoman Rheya Linden told reporters last week.
Kangaroos and their smaller cousins, wallabies, are considered pests by farmers and blamed for destroying crops and competing with livestock for grazing land and water.
The Australian government has approved a jump in the country's annual kangaroo cull which will see about 1.5 million to 6.9 million killed due to a substantial rise in population.
While it is impossible to determine the exact number of kangaroos in Australia, official government estimates say that the four most common species (there are 60 kangaroo species) may total more than 50 million.