Australian farmers in New South Wales (NSW) are being given permission to kill increased numbers of larger species of kangaroos. There is already a kangaroo product industry that sees numbers of the animals hunted down for meat and leather, but now drought has decreased herbage required by both cattle and kangaroos.
Global climate change has been identified as contributing to heat and drought around the world. Study after study identifies meat production as a major, perhaps the major, contributor to greenhouse gases. Between us, humans and domestic animals account for 96 percent of the world’s animal biomass. Meanwhile, meat and dairy production are increasingly identified as among the most significant contributors to climate change.
Long ago, it was recognized that market hunting – killing wildlife for profit – was a fast track to extinction and thus not sustainable within capitalism, which demands continued growth in profits to work properly. But, so insatiable is the gastronomic demand for parts of dead animals that wild animals were simply replaced by domestic ones, which in turn are major sources of greenhouse gases. Animal protectionists have sought to convince environmentalists, including scientists able to understand complex processes that seem to challenge the cognitive abilities of the likes of U.S. president Donald Trump (who is still mired in denial over climate change), that reducing consumption of meat and dairy in favor of a more, even exclusively, plant-based diet is one of the easiest and most effective ways we have to reduce greenhouse gases.
No matter. Instead of attempting to reduce the source of the problem, the meat industry is instead encouraged, and kangaroos must give way so folks won’t have to think twice about their steaks and burgers.
There already is a commercial kangaroo hunt, but with regard NSW, Niall Blair, NSW Minister of Primary Industries, claims that without massive slaughter of kangaroos the kangaroos themselves will first eat all the food, and then starve. Such “pre-emptive euthanasia” is a commonly provided rationale for such culls. Major die-offs, both “natural” and human-caused, do occur in wildlife and natural selection generates adaptation to changing conditions, which are inevitable if we are so unable to control our own contribution to the problem, and clearly that is the case.
Put another way, we, not kangaroos, are the problem. Australia is earmarking $141 million to assist farmers, not only with compensation for lost income, but for mental health support. It will, however, not contribute to the solution to those parts of the problem we can influence, if only we had the intelligence and will to do so.
Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Barry