Australia told to shoot kangaroos before they starve

AFP | Sydney

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com    

Australia’s kangaroos could die in “catastrophic” numbers if a population boom is left unchecked, ecologists have warned, while backing the industrial-scale culling of the marsupials.

To outsiders, the kangaroo is an instantly-recognisable symbol of the Australian wilderness, but within the country the native animal poses a major environmental headache.

Kangaroos have a “boom and bust” population cycle -- when fodder is plentiful on the back of a good wet season their numbers can balloon by tens of millions.

Hopping mobs of kangaroos can rapidly strip paddocks bare, but ecologist Katherine Moseby warned they would starve to death in droves when food ran out.

“The last drought we estimated that 80 or 90 percent of the kangaroos in some areas died,” she told AFP.

“They are starving to death -- going into public toilets and eating toilet paper, or lying on the road starving while their joeys are trying to feed,” she added, referring to events from the last population boom.

Moseby said the kindest way to save kangaroos from this fate was to shoot them, and harvest the meat, as a way of keeping numbers in check.

“It keeps the numbers down so that when we do get drought we don’t get these welfare issues,” she said.

“If we saw them as a resource and managed them like that, we wouldn’t get the catastrophic deaths that we see.”