Australia Wants to Kill Thousands of Kangaroos

According to a report on the Indy Channel, government officials in Canberra, Australia, want to hire professional shooters to cull the kangaroo population from two government properties on the outskirts of Australia's capitol. Some areas have as many as 1,100 kangaroos per square mile. The animals are eating their way through grassy areas where endangered species live. The focus of the government plan is the common eastern gray kangaroo, which can grow to the size of a man. The plan is to complete the shootings by July.

As expected, animal rights people are protesting the plan. Animal Liberation president, Mary Hayes, warned that the government would be known internationally as being cruel. An activist with the Kangaroo Protection Coalition said the government's statement that the kangaroos would starve to death if some were not shot was just "an excuse to kill them."

The government is concerned about endangered species such as the grassland earless dragon, the striped legless lizard, and the golden sun moth.

This is not the first time authorities have culled the kangaroo population. In 2004, 800 kangaroos were eliminated in the Canberra area. The action caused an outcry from animal activists. In 2003, 6,500 eastern grays were killed at a military base near Melbourne. In 2002, more than 2,000 kangaroos were killed in a similar operation on the same base.

The kangaroo is in the unenviable position of being Australia's national symbol while, at the same time, being a pest, eating grasslands intended for livestock. While they are a pest in some areas of the country, Kangaroos are important to the survival of Australia's indigenous peoples. Aboriginals hunt kangaroos for both the meat and the skins. When Europeans arrived in Australia as settlers, they, too, found kangaroos to be necessary for survival. Although millions of kangaroos have been hunted and killed over the years, the problem and the protests come when the shooting moves into urban areas.