Agforce calling for juvenile kangaroos on the menu

Queensland farming lobby group, Agforce has set up a Macropod Advisory Group to investigate how to sustainably harvest kangaroos. In an ABC radio interview yesterday, Qulipie grazier and Agforce's President of Sheep & Wool Stephen Tully outlined how exactly this group proposes the industry should move "forward". Amongst the mistruths and exaggerations being uttered by this farmer came the proposal that juvenile kangaroos be targeted by the kangaroo industry for their superior meat. Below is a section of the interview:

Question: But if there’s a shortage of kangaroo meat surely the price would go up?

No, but the controls that are in there make it nearly impossible…. for example there’s a minimum weight of effectively 16kg on a kangaroo. That’s taking out 90% of the kangaroos you can shoot, 80 – 90% of the kangaroos you can shoot and if you take out that many kangaroos it makes it actually impossible to reach the quota set by the EPA. So there’s all those sorts of things there that all contribute… we also don’t believe that the count is proper anyhow. As well as that the shooting at the moment is taking out nearly all the dominant males so you just get this enormous number of females that are just breeding incredibly rapidly. That’s just doubling every few years the numbers of roos out there because all you are left with is a breeding population of females.

Question: Well there must be some males or the females wouldn’t be breeding, can you explain what the dynamic is? You take out the alpha males, what does that do to the rest of the population?

Well there is obviously some males there because it’s impossible to shoot out all kangaroos because the states just so big and because the product is fairly cheap at the moment. You just can’t afford to spend miles and miles just driving around chasing one kangaroo and as you know one male can do quite a lot of damage in a rampant female population. You don’t need a lot of males to breed females, we might think so but that certainly hasn’t proven the case before. The whole dynamic of it is that in these dry times we’re just getting migrating mobs of kangaroos. If someone gets a storm, if someone tries to save some of their pasture, if there’s a bit of pasture that has been degraded and the local NRM groups have funded fencing to protect that area, you are just getting these migration mobs of kangaroos numbering tens of thousands that are descending on these areas and just turning them into deserts.

Question: So you want to be able to shoot females as well, is that the issue?

We want to make it so that we can shoot females, males, even the younger animals. I mean the best animals to consume are always mature juveniles, the younger animals that are less than 2 years old. We all eat lamb, with beef they are always under 2 years old, that’s always the best product to sell, it’s the highest quality product. At the moment it’s the equivalent of eating old bulls and cattle, it’s the worst quality product. All of those things are hindering the development of this market.

On the current "high" numbers of kangaroos Stephen Tully had the following to say in another interview

“kangaroo (numbers) used to be boom and bust now there’s not so much bust because we’ve put in so many watering points, they just love them and just breed…..

I think the primary reason (for “high” kangaroo numbers) is because the EPA for some reason nobody can quite understand has brought in this minimum size level……. ......Don’t bring in these silly regulations or what size or anything else, leave that up to the industry. They are by far the best ones to judge and treat it as a resource”

Dr David Croft and the THINKK think tank

Fortunately Dr David Croft was also interviewed and he provided listeners with a few home truths regarding the kangaroo industry and the agricultural lobby group. Dr Croft is a member of a new think tank called THINKK established at the Institute of Sustainable Futures. This group has been set up to undertake independant research on kangaroos and provide unbiased information to stakeholders, government departments and the general public. Dr Dror Ben-Ami's opening statement on behalf of THINKK can be found here.

Agforce will also be busy this week attempting to convince the Russians to reverse their decision made last year banning the importation of kangaroo meat. I can only hope that the Russian Trade Commissioner Yuri Aleshin does not succumb to the propoganda being spouted by Agforce's Brent Finlay and Stephen Tully.

At this point I think it appropriate to remind us of the late, great Professor AJ “Jock” Marshall. In his words:

"……there is nothing sacred about sheep farmers. They, like many other people, are doing a worthwhile job for the nation. They are mostly pleasant and useful citizens, but – let us be frank about this – no more valuable to us than members of a dozen or so other groups within the Australian community. Some of them know a great deal about sheep, but they know nothing about the population dynamics and the ecology of kangaroos. So when we hear pressure groups of these worthy people vociferously exclaiming that kangaroos eat nine times as much grass as sheep, or that kangaroos are in no danger of extinction , they can be ignored. Such statements are so much wind…….

Who would have thought that the Koala – at one time one of the commonest animals in Queensland – would ever be rare, but where is it today? We will then, if you please, pay no attention to the views of sheep farmers. Outside the question of sheep, the annual wool clip and the local bending races, their opinions are worthless."