You're going to shoot skippy!?

GnT: We’re lucky they at least spell it correctly phonetically. There was this yank a couple of years back at a wildlife park on the Tasman Peninsular, near Port Arthur. He kept calling them “eastern GAY kangaroos”. Skippy was Gay? This was the same yank who at a restaurant that night, demanded ketchup for the lobster bisque. Give me a break!

eastern gray kangaroos?

Should we be insisting the yanks call them eastern greys?

When faced with overpopulation of a species in an area and dwindling food sources it does make sense to cull the population back to manageable levels until the food source regenerates. There have always been large populations of roos on the Prison land at Wacol in Brisbane; but in the last couple of years they have had to selectively cull due to the drought and other roos migrating in seeking a food source.

There is a growing demand for roo meat as a food source. I quite often but it instead of beef. It has a stronger taste, but with a bit of marinade it is delicious.

Naturally having the roos as one of our national images does not help. Going to the US and frying up a bald eagle would probably earn you the death sentence or 10 years in Guantanamo Bay with no trial.

it’s not really all the world’s news… just a bunch of affiliate television stations picking up on the same AP story. maybe we should get rid of the roo on the coat of arms and we’d stop getting shit from other countries when we want to off a few roos. i might have just been lucky to be born into a family with a long history of farming.. after going roo shooting a few times on a farm you see just how many there are around.

I guess the Sunday Times got their desired outcome with a full-page colour photo of poor old Skippy. Surprised they didn’t picture a gunsight graphic over the top of it…
Why is it that they equate tabloid size with tabloid style? It does the paper nothing but harm to its reputation to travel this sort of direction…

There is a simple reality with roos, as there is with certain other species like noisy miners, and in some places wombats. We have altered the natural environment and in so doing have created an ‘ideal’ environment for one species over all others. This leads to a population boom. Anyone who has studied environmental science will know that an imbalance that leads to a boom always leads to a crash.

So the question here is “is the system surrounding roos in these areas out of balance?” Of course it is. “Is the system facing a crash (i.e. a major starvation event)?” Most certainly it is.

The ACT Animal Liberationalists claimed on 666 yesterday that “there is no evidence of starvation” among the roos. But this is stupidly blinkered. You should not wait until they are starving because then no matter how many you cull – it will be too late for the remainder – the feed is all gone. So instead of a rebalancing operation, you have a total crash, with major animal welfare harm across the entire population.
In addition, they say nothing of the harm and habitat loss being caused by the overgrazing to other species. Many species use grass tussocks as habitat. No grass = no habitat = no species. Is that such a hard concept for these people to grasp?

For the record, I have a BEnvSc(NRM) and I am happy to badged by the Ralphs of this world as a greenie. But I am also a pragmatist and have worked with some of the most environmentally enlightened rural land stewards in this country. Every single farmer I know undertakes roo culls every single year – at the same time as revegetating large tracks of their land. They understand the realities of their world.
People who never step outside the confines of a city need to realise that any artifical environment we create brings with it tough decisions that need to be made to rebalance the adverse effects that it creates.