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By Root 2019 0

against kangaroos are their mobility and fence-jumping prowess: if you invest in promoting growth of a kangaroo population on your property, and if your kangaroos perceive some inducement to move (such as rain falling somewhere else), your valuable crop of kangaroos may end up 30 miles away on somebody else’s property. While kangaroo meat is accepted in Germany and some is exported there, sales of kangaroo meat face cultural obstacles elsewhere. Australians think of kangaroos as vermin holding little appeal for displacing good old British mutton and beef from the dinner plate. Many Australian animal welfare advocates oppose kangaroo harvesting, overlooking the facts that living conditions and slaughter methods are much crueler for domestic sheep and cattle than for wild kangaroos. The U.S. explicitly forbids the importation of kangaroo meat because we find the beasts cute, and because a congress-man’s wife heard that kangaroos are endangered. Some kangaroo species are indeed endangered, but ironically the species actually harvested for meat are abundant pest animals in Australia. The Australian government strictly regulates their harvest and sets a quota.

Whereas introduced sheep have undoubtedly been of great economic benefit (as well as harm) to Australia, introduced rabbits and foxes have been unmitigated disasters. British colonists found Australia’s environment, plants, and animals alien and wanted to be surrounded by familiar European plants and animals. Hence they attempted to introduce many European bird species, only two of which, the House Sparrow and Starling, became widespread, while others (the Blackbird, Song Thrush, Tree Sparrow, Goldfinch, and Greenfinch) became established only locally. At least, those introduced bird species have not done much harm, while Australia’s rabbits in plague numbers cause enormous economic damage and land degradation by consuming about half of the pasture vegetation that would otherwise have been available to sheep and cattle (Plate 30). Along with habitat changes through sheep grazing and suppression of Aboriginal land burning, the combination of introduced rabbits and introduced foxes has been a major cause of the extinctions or population crashes of most species of small native Australian mammals: foxes prey on them, and rabbits compete with native herbivorous mammals for food.

European rabbits and foxes were introduced to Australia almost simultaneously. It is unclear whether foxes were introduced first to permit traditional British fox hunting, then rabbits introduced later to provide additional food for the foxes, or whether rabbits were introduced first for hunting or to make the countryside look more like Britain and then foxes introduced later to control the rabbits. In any case, both have been such expensive disasters that it now seems incredible that they were introduced for such trivial reasons. Even more incredible are the efforts to which Australians went to establish rabbits: the first four attempts failed (because the rabbits released were tame white rabbits that died), and not until wild Spanish rabbits were used for the fifth attempt did success follow.

Ever since those rabbits and foxes did become established and Australians realized the consequences, they have been trying to eliminate or reduce their populations. The war against foxes involves poisoning or trapping them. One method in the war against rabbits, memorable to all non-Australians who saw the recent film Rabbit Proof Fence, is to divide up the landscape by long fences and attempt to eliminate rabbits from one side of the fence. Farmer Bill McIntosh told me how he makes a map of his property to mark the locations of every one of its thousands of rabbit burrows, which he destroys individually with a bulldozer. He then returns to a burrow later, and if it shows any fresh sign of rabbit activity, he drops dynamite down the burrow to kill the rabbits and then seals up the burrow. In this laborious way he has destroyed 3,000 rabbit burrows. Such expensive measures led Australians several decades ago