kangaroo meat

Kangaroo may become a commercial Victorian venture

John Kelly, executive officer of the Kangaroo Industry Association of Australia, is a persistent predator of kangaroos, for profits from their meat and skins, and is honing in on his prey.

Australia's kangaroo meat industry could soon expand into Victoria, which is the only state that does not allow the commercial harvest of kangaroos. The idea was bandied around in the 1980s, and again in 2002, but due to intensive agriculture and land clearing, the plan was shelved due to insufficient kangaroo numbers.

The Victorian government is looking at what regulatory changes would be needed to turn the "culling" of kangaroos into a commercial harvest. Up to 30,000 kangaroo carcasses are "wasted" because they are killed by farmers, due to liberal interpretation of what "pest" impacts are, and the easy gain of the DSE Authority to Control Wildlife permits.

Conveniently, this comes as the kangaroo meat industry hopes to reopen its biggest traditional market for roo meat - Russia - a country that sensibly banned the imports due to hygiene concerns.

The ABC is to screen a documentary about kangaroos. It is scheduled for television on ABC1 channel will this coming Tuesday evening 21st February 2012 at 8:30pm
It is set in Canberra, Australian Capital Territroy, alias the 'Taijin' of kangaroo slaughter.

The programme is entitled #10;">'Kangaroo Mob'

But the prior promotional trailer includes snippets of interviews with those seeking to sell their sick desire for mass slaughter of Australia's native kangaroos.
Is this documentary really disguised propaganda by a locally struggling trade in Australian wildlife?

The ABC is to screen a documentary about kangaroos. It is scheduled for television on ABC1 channel will this coming Tuesday evening 21st February 2012 at 8:30pm
It is set in Canberra, Australian Capital Territroy, alias the 'Taijin' of kangaroo slaughter.

REGIONAL AUSTRALIA – Greens Policy Statement

I work with wildlife carers, animal rights activists and wildlife conservationists from Australia and overseas. Recently we came across the new Greens Policy Summary booklet and on p.26 we were horrified to read:-

‘The Greens will … support green businesses which use native species.’
Also
‘The greens will …. Offer financial incentives for sustainable farming systems and improve funding for regional natural resource management.’

The government frequently refers to the ‘sustainable harvesting of renewable resources’ meaning killing kangaroos and native animals.

We don’t have a problem with green businesses using native flora but we do have a problem with businesses using native fauna. It sounds like the Greens party supports the kangaroo and possum killing industries, or may openly do so in the future. In Tasmania the commercial possum industry almost wiped out the ring tail possum – and now they are trying to start up the brush tail possum industry for export to China.

We wrote letters to all the Greens MPs and received back a standard reply saying that basically that ‘this statement should be understood in the context of the greens animal policy which states as a key principle that ‘native animals and their habitats must be protected.’

What immoral hypocrisy we have in Australian Government when one department legitimises mass kangaroo slaughter as a 'kangaroo industry' and promotes 'kangaroo harvesting', while another department promotes the kangaroo as its 'hopping icon.'

Tourism Australia's latest marketing campaign claims to be based on the '#FF0000">core truth'.
Well how can it be truthful? Tourism Australia needs to drop the kangaroo logo from its advertising while the slaughter continues or else drop its core truth campaign.

Kangaroos are indeed what is 'unique and special' about Australia. It is immoral to slaughter wildlife. It is hypocritical to promote wildlife values while also promoting its slaughter.

Some claim kangaroo meat is 'green'. Some even claim killing kangaroos is 'better' for Australia's environment. So what if Australian farmers of lamb, beef, pork and chicken transitioned to kangaroo?

To this author it is like employing Ivan Milat to skin platypus for cheap token tourist purses.

Personal bias aside, Australia's Federal Treasury Secretary, Ken Henry, has highlighted the flawed presumptions of Australia's roo trade as unviable.

The following extracts are taken from Sydney Morling Herald's Jacob Saulwick in his article 'Henry doubts viability of roo harvesting' of 13-Mar-10:

Menkit's reaction to the vicious slaughter by Chris Palmer to kangaroos is an understandable normal human reaction. The slaughter and abuse of Australia wildlife makes my blood curdle.

On 29-Mar-2010, Chris Palmer, the self-confessed serial roo shooter on CanDoBetter wrote:

"My son is an up and coming roo shooter to at the age of 4 he can skin and gut a roo nearly as quick as me and over the last 4 weekends he has shoot over 50 roos with only 8 misses they still didnt get away tho like always dad was there to clean up the mess."

Clearly, this individual values his behaviour of slaughtering kangaroos acceptable to the extent he is inculcating in his young son his same values, attitudes and practices from an early age. Shooting wildlife is a violent crime against the natural animal kingdom. We are not savages anymore. We don't have to kill wild animals. It is a choice and an immoral act. Clean kills are wrong but also occasional. The suffering death of a bullet injury by a 4 year old followed up with a knife or blunt axe to the joey reflects a vicious and depraved existence.

The message being sent by the Australian Government in this 21st Century and in this UN International Year of Biodiversity is that killing wildlife and trade in wildlife is in 2010 somehow acceptable. Even Australia’s Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett at the CITES conference this month failed to oppose the continuation of international trade in critically endangered Bluefin Tuna and Polar Bears. Garrett should go back to singing for his supper.

Australia’s many species of macropods (mainly kangaroo and wallabies) used to be prolific. Now according to the World Wildlife Fund, 42 macropod species are listed, or in the process of being listed, on the IUCN red-list of species threatened with extinction. The distribution and abundance of all bettongs has been severely affected since European settlement. Of all 10 types of bettongs four are extinct, three are threatened and three are considered to be at low risk of extinction.

Western Australia’s woylie population has suffered more than a 90 per cent decline and has been re-listed as critically endangered. Of all five types of potoroos, one species is extinct, three are threatened and one subspecies is considered low risk despite suffering a 10-50 per cent decline in population. With 80 per cent of potoroo species extinct or at risk of extinction, this group of macropods has been severely affected.

A question to any West Australian readers: Which kangaroo was most commonly targeted by hunters in the mid to late 1920's? ... Well I'm being a bit unfair, the answer isn't a kangaroo at all as the answer is the western brush (or black gloved) wallaby. Around that period western brush wallaby skins were exported in higher numbers than red kangaroo or western grey skins. Which species is exploited most commonly these days? Well I can tell you it isn't the western brush wallaby, they are now listed as near-vulnerable. To the vast majority of Australians living in large cities the answer doesn't seem to matter anyway, the generic term "kangaroo" is often used when discussing anything macropod related. Kangaroo numbers being in "plague proportions" or the labelling of them as pests appears to apply to all of our larger marsupials.

Picture:3 year old kangaroo stops his recreational boxing to watch wildlife carer,
Anne-Marie Dineen (Oakview Refuge, Queensland) go past in her front garden.

Campaign supported by high profile actress

Philip Woolley, UK Rep and EU Campaign Director for the Australian Wildlife Protection Council writes that Dame Judi Dench, star of the new Robert Marshall film NINE to be released on 26 December, has become the latest celebrity to add her voice to the campaign to have kangaroo products banned from all EU member states.

Dame Judi, one of Britain’s best loved and respected actors and a great animal welfare supporter said:

“As a lover of animals and their welfare I am pleased to add my name to the many others across the world who are supporting this very worthwhile campaign.”

She joins a growing list of well known people who are appalled at what is happening to these sentient beings in Australia, all for the sake of a few dollars and the manufacture of sports footwear.

Philip Woolley expressed his pleasure at Dame Judi's support.

The 2009 mass slaughter of kangaroos across western New South Wales and Queensland is of a slaughter scale approximating the 1994 genocide of ethnic Tutsis in Rwanda by the dominant Hutus.

The Rwandan Genocide was the 1994 mass killing of hundreds of thousands of Rwanda's Ethnic Tutsis and Hutu political moderates by Hutus under the Hutu Power ideology. Over the course of approximately 100 days, from the assassination of Juvénal Habyarimana on 6 April through mid-July, at least 500,000 people were killed. Estimates of the death toll have ranged between 500,000 and 1,000,000, or as much as 20% of the total population of the country.

In Australia, the website of the Kangaroo Industry Association of Australia explains how 'The Kangaroo Industry Works':

"Every year the National Parks Authorities in each State conduct surveys of the kangaroo population by flying over large samples of the rangelands at low levels and counting the numbers of kangaroos. After 20 years of such monitoring the techniques have been refined to produce very accurate indicators of total populations and trends in populations numbers.

Canadian sealer about to club a seal pup. © IFAW
harpseals.org

On 5th May 2009, Members of the European Parliament voted in favour of adopting strict conditions for the placing on the market of seal products in the European Union.

The way kangaroo joeys are slaughtered by 'professionals' is comparable to that still inflicted on Canadian fur seal pups. Australian poaching of its wildlife places it culturally backward in the 19th Century, when native animals were vermin and 'the 'bush' regarded as wasteland.

Now extinct on mainland Australia, the Tasmanian Pademelon remains a target of legalised poaching on the island.

Australia's Federal Minister for the Environment (etc), Peter Garett MP, controls and administers a legal code permitting various species of kangaroos to be killed for commercial gain and export of meat and hides. Nationally this permission is prescribed under the National Code of Practice for the Humane Shooting of Kangaroos and Wallabies for Commercial Purposes' [The Code]

Under Section 3 of the Code, SHOOTING FOR COMMERCIAL PURPOSES', the following six species of macropods (marsupials belonging to the botanical family Macropodidae including kangaroos, wallabies, tree-kangaroos, pademelons):

Taxpayers should not be funding handouts to help "restructure" this vile and cruel industry.

How dare John Kelly of the despicable commercial kangaroo killing industry ask for handouts due to the fallout from Russia placing a ban on kangaroo meat imports!

The ban has been in force since August, after the Russian government agency, Rosselkhoznadzor, first voiced its concerns about
possible contamination.

Now the struggling Australian industry is appealing for assistance from the federal government.

There is too much hiding behind the shooters code of practice, and publicity that the action is humane. That deludes the public that it's all done without pain or trauma to the animals being killed.

Kangaroos shot at in the dark are easily traumatized, and they are very stress-prone animals. How could all these shots be "clean" head shots, without near misses? The code of practice is not humane. Who is responsible for setting the guidelines for what is 'humane'?

(art work: courtesy of Carol Drew)

ZOONOSIS: (zo"o-no'sis) pl. zoono'ses - a disease of animals that may be transmitted to man under natural conditions.

The simplest definition of a zoonosis is a disease that can be transmitted from other vertebrate animals to humans. A slightly more technical definition is a disease that normally infects other animals, but can also infect humans. It is hard to be certain which diseases jumped from other animals to humans, but there is good evidence that measles, smallpox, influenza, HIV, and diphtheria came to us this way. The common cold, and tuberculosis, may also have started in other species.

The majority of pathogen species causing disease in humans are zoonotic - estimated at 75% of all human diseases in Australia.

Zoonotic diseases can be caused by bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites.

Wildlife

Diseases of wildlife can cause significant illness and death to individual animals and can significantly affect wildlife populations. Wildlife species can also serve as natural hosts for certain diseases that affect humans (zoonoses).

Many rare species are being pushed towards extinction by exposure to human illnesses, scientists say.

New diseases threaten humans and wildlife

The Australian outback town of Mitchell lies in the Western Downs region of southern Queensland on the Warrego Highway just shy of 600 km west of Brisbane on the way to Charleville. Situated on the Maranoa River, the town of Mitchell was named in honour of the 19th Century explorer, and the town emerged as a pastoral town out of the farming of grains, beef and sheep. Tourism has become a strong drawcard to Mitchell and especially to its Great Artesian Spa.

But more recently, Mitchell's fame has been lowered to infamy with it taking on a reputation for becoming the home of the kangaroo slaughter trade.

"You see a lot of utes in Mitchell and the towns just like it that emerge from the roadside only to disppear again as you drive west through southern Queensland on the Warrego Highway. You can tell the ones that are driven by kangaroo shooters. They have racks for guns and long spikes upon which the freshly eviscerated carcasses are placed. One, parked just around the corner, has black steel bullbars with the words "roo raper" cut into them."

ACT Commissioner for Sustainability and the Environment, Dr Maxine Cooper, is ACT's inaugural full-time Commissioner in the role, yet what relevant environmental qualifications and experience does the incumbent have, or indeed lack, to be officially condemning another local indigenous popluation of Australia's iconic marsupials, our kangaroos, to slaughter for pet food?
The Environment Commissioner's own website lists her formal qualifications in the areas of Environmental Planning, Environmental Design and Environmental Science. All these 'environmentally' friendly prefixes sound impressive, until one realises that each of these areas of academic study are not fauna focused, but indeed all about human-centric utilisation of the natural environment for the benefit of humans. That is, these qualifications are all about maximising the convenience of the environment for humans. A wolf in charge of the kangaroos?

Editorial comment: Please continue discussion on "Kangaroo Meat - confessions of a serial wildlife killer" (see, also, #moved">below).

The kangaroo killing lobby portrays kangaroo meat eating as being romantic - a new gourmet taste sensation which helps the environment. In reality it is barbaric, potentially dangerous to health and environmentally irresponsible.

KANGAROO MEAT IS UNHEALTHY
Kangaroos are hung upside down with hooks through their hind legs for hours before being killed. This horrific suffering releases myopathy toxins. The bodies are driven around on a dusty unhygienic truck all night then placed in inadequately refrigerated ‘chillers’ for up to two weeks, leading to contamination with faeces, maggots, e.coli and more (see http://www.animal-lib.org.au/campaigns/kangaroo-campaign.htm).