The ACT government’s slaughter of thousands of kangaroos every year is inherently cruel, senseless and ecologically catastrophic.
Kangaroos are in crisis across Australia as a result of the combined impact of the commercial meat and skins industry and persecution as agricultural ‘pests’. Consequently, kangaroos everywhere are, in fact, being killed much faster than their populations can grow. The methodology used to estimate kangaroo populations has been exposed as deeply flawed in many parts of Australia. In Canberra, people who walk in and explore ACT nature reserves on a daily basis report far fewer sightings of kangaroos in reserves where the repeated, programmed slaughter has occured.
It is the ACT government that has pioneered the idea of persecuting kangaroos as environmental ‘pests’, concocting a body of pseudo-science to blind the public to what appears to be, in fact, an extermination campaign. Evidence of the failure of the government’s alleged scientic arguments includes the non-sensical notion of classifying kangaroos as an ‘invasive species’ (ACT State of the Environment Report 2023).
Over the last year, many more Canberrans have become aware of the facts about what is happening in the ACT and the plight of our kangaroos. Canberra is the nation’s capital, and many events are coming up which bring thousands of people to the ACT, including many from overseas.
Kangaroos are a keystone species, critical to maintaining the other native plants and animals that share their habitat
Kangaroo families are terrorised night after night, for months, year after year, on Canberra’s nature reserves – areas of protected land where they are meant to be safe. Those that are not killed by the first shot may take hours, days, weeks or months to die of horrific injuries.
Stress is often fatal to kangaroos and the level of stress caused by recurrent large-scale shooting is extreme. Kangaroos also die fleeing the shooting into the high speed roads and barbed wire fences that surround and bisect their habitat.
Dear little pouch joeys are (by law) either decapitated or bludgeoned to death. Even more horrific, orphaned at-foot joeys that escape shooting die of dehydration, starvation, hypothermia, car strike or predation.
The government falsely claims that the killing is to protect the ecosystems of the reserves. In fact, the real risk to these ecosystems is constant erosion by encroaching urban development.
Many residents believe that it is the government’s obsession with developing every scrap of vacant land in the ACT that is motivating its eradication of the ACT’s kangaroos.