Went up the hill today on my place and came across one of the eastern grey kangaroos that live on my property. These are the very same type of roo about to be massacred in Canberra, our national capital - and similar to many 1000's of others that are shot around the country each year.
dragonfly5 wrote:
Very nice.
I can't recall seeing a thread on Kangaroos before.
Only in books and on TV.
Thanks Dragonfly5. Come out to Oz, and I'll introduce you to mine. Unfortunately, many Australians take kangaroos for granted and don't appreciate them for what they are.
Charles
They are nice pics! Your Kangaroo is a very attractive one
So they are about to Cull the Kangaroos in Canberra? That is quite sad. I suppose the bush fires have cleared large areas of forest and created a perfect environment for large Kangaroo numbers?. All those pine forests would be fields of grass by now.
I never like culling, since so long as the food supply is plentiful, the population will just multiply again. They are better off dealing with cutting them off from such plentiful food supply, like they do when bird populations grow too large. Then the population will balance itself out naturally.
natalia.atkins wrote:
They are nice pics! Your Kangaroo is a very attractive one
So they are about to Cull the Kangaroos in Canberra? That is quite sad. I suppose the bush fires have cleared large areas of forest and created a perfect environment for large Kangaroo numbers?. All those pine forests would be fields of grass by now.
I never like culling, since so long as the food supply is plentiful, the population will just multiply again. They are better off dealing with cutting them off from such plentiful food supply, like they do when bird populations grow too large. Then the population will balance itself out naturally.
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Thanks for the positive comment, Natalia. Her name is Dillo, and she is a pretty one.
There are many myths and much ignorance in Australia regarding our treatment of kangaroos. 6.5 milion per year 'culled', where 'culled' represents cruelly killing by shooting with the joeys being 'euthanised' by a blow on the head with an iron bar. The latter piece of advice comes from the official government guidelines on killing kangaroos. You can google it on the net.
It's a subject worth looking into further by all Aussies.
Yes, I agree that culling is a very ignorant way to handle things!.
I have chatted to environment professionals who deal with such problems, such as large bird populations which gather around airports causing danger to flights.
The professionals almost never cull. They deal with the problem by adjusting the food supply, and even create `sacrifice crops' to attract the `plague' birds to another area, whilst working out what food supply caused the population boom. Its almost always caused by Human carelessness and stupidity, such as garbage tips, habitat destruction, and planting foods that attract the offending birds.
No doubt the Roo issue in Canberra could be attributed to human causes. Its sad to see animals pay the price for what we do.
Nice shots, there are quite a few living on farmland near me. We are lucky here as we are in the south where the food is plenty for them (I had a bad accident last year when one hit my car, crossing the road for a better food paddock) Our Roos are much luckier than those up north of western Australia, they starve from lack of food and there are way too many of them so sometimes keeping their numbers down is kinder than to leave them alone. I don’t like it but it’s a fact of life in drought
aladyforty wrote:
Nice shots, there are quite a few living on farmland near me. We are lucky here as we are in the south where the food is plenty for them (I had a bad accident last year when one hit my car, crossing the road for a better food paddock) Our Roos are much luckier than those up north of western Australia, they starve from lack of food and there are way too many of them so sometimes keeping their numbers down is kinder than to leave them alone. I don’t like it but it’s a fact of life in drought
Thanks for the comment.
There are quite a few roos in my local area too - the Adelaide Hills.
The drought is killing roos in the Flinders Ranges in SA as well - along with River Red Gums hundreds of years old. Scientists are saying that the ecology of the area is being permanently changed. Yes, it's a fact of life (and death) in drought.
