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City under siege by kangaroo glut
By Rod McGuirk |
April 19, 2009, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
THEY bounce across the roof of Parliament House. They collide with cars. They come in through the bedroom window. Canberra, Australia's capital, has a problem - too many kangaroos.
Authorities have tried giving them vasectomies and oral contraceptives, to no avail. They say trucking them to new and distant pastures is too expensive. Now they're proposing a cull. But many people are aghast at the idea of their best-known marsupial being shot en masse in the national capital.
A government survey has found that more than 80 percent of Canberra residents think the wild kangaroos should stay. On the other hand, in a different survey, 17 percent of drivers in the district reported colliding with a kangaroo at least once.
Canberra's latest man-v-roo horror story concerns a confused beast, standing about 1.75 meters high on its powerful hind legs, which last month bounded through a closed bedroom window onto a bed where a couple huddled with their nine-year-old daughter, then hopped into their 10-year-old son's bedroom.
The animal was wrestled out of the house by the father, Beat Ettlin, and headed for the hills, leaving claw marks on a bed and a trail of blood from broken glass.
Maxine Cooper, envir-onment commissioner for the government of the Australian Capital Territory, says humans aren't the only ones at risk - the kangaroos are destroying the grassy native habitat of endangered species such as a 15-centimeter-long lizard known as the earless dragon.
But "compare that to anything furry with big eyes - the human emotions generally respond to furriness and big eyes," Cooper said.
In fact, culls are nothing new. Barry Stuart, who runs a kangaroo abattoir 350 kilometers north of Canberra, shoots more than 25 on most nights with a license from the government.
The culling quota has been set at 4 million for 2009. "You don't like to destroy them, but when the time comes, you've got to do it. They're a beautiful bloody animal," said Stuart, 60.
But a cull in the capital is likely to be a different matter. Last year, during the killing of about 400 kangaroos that had eaten themselves close to starvation on fenced military land in Canberra, the protests were so heated that the killers, using stun gun and lethal injections, had to work behind screens.
This time the opposition will be no less vigorous, warns Pat O'Brien, president of the Wildlife Protection Association of Australia, whose patrons are the family of the late "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin.
O'Brien insists that, earless dragons notwithstanding, Canberra's kangaroos pose no environmental problems. "It's disgraceful that people want to shoot our national symbol," O'Brien said. "The days when wildlife is managed with a gun should be long past."
No one knows how many kangaroos are at large in and around the city of 340,000 people, but its forested hills, grasslands and parks make it perfect kangaroo country.
Cooper says they need to be reduced by thousands, and urgently.
Populations began exploding after European settlers arrived some 220 years ago and felled forests. The plant-eating kangaroos swarmed and multiplied in open grassland.
The struggle to manage and control Australia's flora and fauna, native and imported, seems never-ending.
Fences thousands of kilometers long have gone up to keep out rabbits and wild dog called dingoes. Up to 1 million feral camels introduced as pack animals in the 19th century are denuding central desert regions.
Last month Australians slaughtered thousands of poisonous toads whose forebears were imported from South America in 1935 to protect sugarcane plantations.
The larger of the more than 60 kangaroo species have bred so abundantly in some areas they threaten crops and denude their own habitat. "No one likes wild animals more than I do," Stuart said. "But you've got to manage them, otherwise you'll be overrun by the bloody things."
Authorities have tried giving them vasectomies and oral contraceptives, to no avail. They say trucking them to new and distant pastures is too expensive. Now they're proposing a cull. But many people are aghast at the idea of their best-known marsupial being shot en masse in the national capital.
A government survey has found that more than 80 percent of Canberra residents think the wild kangaroos should stay. On the other hand, in a different survey, 17 percent of drivers in the district reported colliding with a kangaroo at least once.
Canberra's latest man-v-roo horror story concerns a confused beast, standing about 1.75 meters high on its powerful hind legs, which last month bounded through a closed bedroom window onto a bed where a couple huddled with their nine-year-old daughter, then hopped into their 10-year-old son's bedroom.
The animal was wrestled out of the house by the father, Beat Ettlin, and headed for the hills, leaving claw marks on a bed and a trail of blood from broken glass.
Maxine Cooper, envir-onment commissioner for the government of the Australian Capital Territory, says humans aren't the only ones at risk - the kangaroos are destroying the grassy native habitat of endangered species such as a 15-centimeter-long lizard known as the earless dragon.
But "compare that to anything furry with big eyes - the human emotions generally respond to furriness and big eyes," Cooper said.
In fact, culls are nothing new. Barry Stuart, who runs a kangaroo abattoir 350 kilometers north of Canberra, shoots more than 25 on most nights with a license from the government.
The culling quota has been set at 4 million for 2009. "You don't like to destroy them, but when the time comes, you've got to do it. They're a beautiful bloody animal," said Stuart, 60.
But a cull in the capital is likely to be a different matter. Last year, during the killing of about 400 kangaroos that had eaten themselves close to starvation on fenced military land in Canberra, the protests were so heated that the killers, using stun gun and lethal injections, had to work behind screens.
This time the opposition will be no less vigorous, warns Pat O'Brien, president of the Wildlife Protection Association of Australia, whose patrons are the family of the late "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin.
O'Brien insists that, earless dragons notwithstanding, Canberra's kangaroos pose no environmental problems. "It's disgraceful that people want to shoot our national symbol," O'Brien said. "The days when wildlife is managed with a gun should be long past."
No one knows how many kangaroos are at large in and around the city of 340,000 people, but its forested hills, grasslands and parks make it perfect kangaroo country.
Cooper says they need to be reduced by thousands, and urgently.
Populations began exploding after European settlers arrived some 220 years ago and felled forests. The plant-eating kangaroos swarmed and multiplied in open grassland.
The struggle to manage and control Australia's flora and fauna, native and imported, seems never-ending.
Fences thousands of kilometers long have gone up to keep out rabbits and wild dog called dingoes. Up to 1 million feral camels introduced as pack animals in the 19th century are denuding central desert regions.
Last month Australians slaughtered thousands of poisonous toads whose forebears were imported from South America in 1935 to protect sugarcane plantations.
The larger of the more than 60 kangaroo species have bred so abundantly in some areas they threaten crops and denude their own habitat. "No one likes wild animals more than I do," Stuart said. "But you've got to manage them, otherwise you'll be overrun by the bloody things."
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