Australia’s beloved kangaroos are now controversial pests
A mother kangaroo and her joey hop across Main Street to graze on a scruff of grass growing near a gas pump. It’s a cool spring evening in White Cliffs, a quirky opal-mining town here in New South Wales. Locals live like hobbits here, in ventilated holes. Thousands of mine shafts pock the parched earth but the two eastern grey kangaroos are an unexpected, rare sighting.
Tourists point and gawk. Children ooh and aah. When the sun begins to set, the kangaroos head out of town. Later, a grim-faced man pays his bill in a local restaurant, climbs into a white truck with hooks on the back, and drives off. His job that night: to kill as many kangaroos as he can.
Australia has a complicated relationship with its national symbol. Kangaroos are among the world’s most iconic, charismatic species — the living, bounding emblems of the country’s unique biodiversity. At once sublime and adorably absurd, they are evolutionary marvels — the only large animal that hops. And Australians are demonstrably proud of them. Kangaroos star in movies and TV shows, poems and children’s books. Their images adorn the country’s currency, coat of arms, commercial airlines and athletic uniforms. To outsiders, the big-footed, fat-tailed, perky-eared creatures are a stand-in for the country itself. There may be no animal and nation in the world more closely identified.
However, there are more than twice as many kangaroos as people in Australia, according to official government figures, and many Aussies consider them pests. Many landholding farmers say that the country’s estimated 50 million kangaroos damage their crops and compete with livestock for scarce resources. Overgrazing is a constant worry and kangaroos only make it worse.
Australia’s insurance industry says that kangaroos are involved in more than 80 percent of the 20,000-plus vehicle-animal collisions reported each year. In the country’s arid, sparsely populated interior, the common belief is that kangaroo numbers have increased exponentially in the absence of traditional predators such as dingoes and Aboriginal hunters. Therefore, killing kangaroos is crucial to ecological balance.
And to boosting the rural economy. A government-sanctioned industry, based on the commercial harvest of kangaroo meat and hides, exported $29 million in products in 2017 and supports about 4,000 jobs. Today, meat, hides and leather from our four non-threatened species — eastern grays, western grays, reds and common wallaroos — have been exported to 56 countries. Global brands such as Nike, Puma and Adidas buy strong, supple “ k-leather” to make athletic gear. And kangaroo meat, once sold mainly as pet food, is finding its way into more and more grocery stores and high-end restaurants. Advocates point out that low-fat, high-protein kangaroo meat comes from an animal more environmentally friendly than greenhouse gas-emitting sheep and cattle. Many ecologists agree with it, that there is no more humane and sustainable way of producing red meat than harvesting food and fibres from animals adapted to Australia’s fragile rangelands.
Opponents of the industry are a vocal minority. Animal welfare organisations, celebrities, and a growing number of scientists call the culls inhumane, unsustainable and unnecessary. While some ecologists have maintained that the kangaroo population has reached plague proportions, opponents have asserted that it is biologically implausible. Joeys grow slowly and many die, so kangaroo populations can expand by only 10 to 15 percent a year, and then only under the best of circumstances.
In many ways, the controversy boils down to an existential question: What is a kangaroo? To some, it’s a pest to be eradicated. To others, it’s a resource to be exploited. Still, others see a beloved native animal to be conserved. These conflicting views are pitting neighbour against neighbour, especially in rural areas. Australia, it seems, is a nation divided over a bounding marsupial.