FEATURE - Australia drought puts kangaroo war in cross-hairs
Date: 27-May-03
Country: AUSTRALIA
Author: Michael Byrnes
While downpours are beginning to cause traffic chaos in the big cities as the drought on the eastern seaboard ends in floods, mobs of the Australian national symbol are still bounding down main streets of parched country towns in search of food.
In one reported case, kangaroos attacked and killed a dog.
"Kangaroos are rife. Five shooters on a property don't make a dent. It's a massive problem," said an official with Queensland farmers group AgForce.
The kangaroos' plight is desperate and millions of them are dying.
The worst drought in 100 years is cutting through a kangaroo population farmers say had grown to three times the nation's 20 million people, and turned the cuddly-looking animal into an overgrown pest.
"All around the paddocks, under every tree, there's dead 'roos. What a terrible way to go, starving to death in their millions," grazier and kangaroo expert Brian Rutledge told Reuters from his property in the Queensland outback.
Rutledge, who has worked his 45,000-ha (110,000-acre) sheep and cattle farm at Cunamulla 1,000 km (620 miles) west of Brisbane, for decades, says he has never seen anything like it and it shows there is something wrong with Australia's management of kangaroos.
Pat O'Brien, president of the Wildlife Protection Association of Australia, agrees.
But ask what the problem is and the grazier and the conservationist are poles apart.
HUMAN WAR OVER KANGAROOS
The drought has inflamed a bitter debate over kangaroos - one side is convinced the marsupials have become a plague, and the other that they are endangered by organised culling and environmental degradation.
Rutledge, who represents farmers on the Queensland state government's Kangaroo Management Advisory Committee, blames European colonisation for spawning an explosion in kangaroo numbers through the supply of water, land clearing and feed for cattle and sheep.
The more land is cleared of forest, the more pasture to eat and the more the kangaroos will breed.
With the government estimating in 2002 that there were 63 million kangaroos, Rutledge argues there are hundreds of times more kangaroos in Australia now than when Europeans first arrived in the southern continent 200 years ago.
"There were six kangaroos on the property when our grandfather came here just before the First World War. Now any night I can shoot six from the bedroom window," he told Reuters.
O'Brien, a retired butcher also on the committee, disagrees.
There was enough grass in Australia at the time of European settlement to have supported 400 million kangaroos, he said.
Present population estimates were "a wild stab in the dark". Kangaroos are in such rapid decline that they are very nearly an endangered species, especially the large desert-dwelling red kangaroos, he said.
The death of large numbers of kangaroos during severe drought is normal. But with a recent run of bad bushfires and the severe drought, some wonder if kangaroo numbers will bounce back.
A BULLET TO THE HEAD
At issue is a government-sponsored annual cull, which has been a bone of contention between animal rights groups and farmers for years.
Australia's official 2003 commercial kangaroo cull limit is 6.55 million, down by five percent. The actual commercial kill in recent years has been only around half of that.
But images of beer-swilling Australians paralysing kangaroos in the headlight beams of pickup trucks before they shoot them has engendered a worldwide campaign against the killings.
Rutledge believes a quick bullet to the head is a more humane death for kangaroos than death by starvation, or the terrifying experience of being trucked to abattoirs.
No way, says O'Brien said.
"It's natural for kangaroos to die in a drought. It's like closing down a computer, it happens slowly, it's a natural process, the animal slows itself down and finishes up dying."
Rutledge, on the other hand, accuses animal rights activists of the mass destr
