AR-News: (AU) Roos fall to nature's cull

[Animalara2003 at aol.com]

The Weekend Austrailan
By Richard Sproull
May 08, 2004 
TWENTY-FIVE years of commercial hunting across the South Australian savannah 
and Peter Absalom can't recall a drought killing off kangaroos as it has in 
the past 12 months.

"Everybody is feeling the pain," Absalom says. 
"In a drought nothing survives ... the poor things." 
Absalom is a "field processor" who works around Mulyungarie Station, north of 
Broken Hill. 
He culls roos under the annual quota set down by National Parks and Wildlife 
after aerial surveys of the kangaroo population inside a "commercial zone". 
His kills help service a regulated $200 million industry, which is a 
by-product of a government-mandated kangaroo cull in South Australia, Western 
Australia, NSW and Queensland. For consumers, this is presented as a range of products 
including kangaroo fillets, steaks, a range of marinated steaks, kebabs, mini 
roasts, sausages, burgers and mince. 
Absalom's anecdotal account of the drought's impact is confirmed by Stuart 
Cairns, a University of New England zoologist and population ecologist, who has 
just returned from Mulyungarie and says the density in the area has fallen 
from more than 50 kangaroos per square kilometre to about 15 per square 
kilometre. 
"Its knocked them for a six, ," Dr Cairns says of the drought's impact on the 
kangaroo population. "In NSW, numbers are probably down by 50 per cent. I do 
my work in South Australia and numbers are down there by a third and I think 
they will go down again." 



full story:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,9499141%255E3041
7,00.html 


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    "The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those 
rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of 
tyranny. The question is not can they REASON, nor can they TALK, but can they 
SUFFER?" 
Jeremy Bentham 1748 - 1832 



         
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