Author: AWPC

Share this page ABOVE: from a hunting website in Queensland a year ago. As in Queensland, the NSW government is actively calling for ‘volunteers’  to shoot the wildlife – “to help the farmers” they say. Apart from basic ethical and usefulness issues, in both states there is no evidence of oversight on capacity to shoot accurately; take care of joeys; or manage any welfare questions. by Maria Taylor – 27/06/2018 Taken from: https://districtbulletin.com.au/us-end-game/ THE FOLLOWING IS an excerpted chapter from book Injustice, the War on Australian Wildlife by Maria Taylor. The subject is Australia’s fraught relationship with much of its wildlife since colonial times and how certain values and beliefs have stuck with many of us in this country. The kangaroo species that are hunted and unjustly treated as pests is the standout case study. The mainstream version of our relationship to this unique marsupial is told every day as with one voice by graziers and some farmers, major political parties, some applied ecologists, mass media and in most cases, the kangaroo ‘harvesting’ industry. Together they support the world’s biggest terrestrial wildlife slaughter. The countless millions of kangaroos people believe are bounding across the landscape are in large part a mathematical figment that has received well-deserved deconstruction. In this chapter Taylor talks to two former ‘roo shooters who tell a different story – not from a desktop, but from ground-level. They reveal the horrors that are going on right now in south west Queensland in the name of drought relief and to prop up hopes for revival of a sheep industry there. And the same ideas and proposed solution to blame kangaroos are seeping into NSW. “I rang the federal member for Roma the other day and said: have you been into parliament to tell them to change the coat of arms for Australia? She says why? I said because you’ve shot the kangaroo and emu out. She slammed the phone down on me. “Between the drought and the cluster fencing; the poisoning (of waterholes) and the shooting; the kangaroo is wiped out in western Queensland.” — Tom King Snr, Cunnamulla “We’ve been driving through (Central Queensland) for seven years. Except for one very wet year we have seen (and smelt) lots of dead animals. One year we saw the bodies of kangaroos and other wildlife every five metres around Longreach. We’ve seen dingoes killed and scalped and hung from posts and large poison bait (1080) signs. The region has an all-out assault on wildlife. These ways of treating wildlife are very traditional; but what about the desire in these areas to increase tourism?” — Dr Arian Wallach, University of Technology Sydney,conducting dingo research in Central Queensland LYN GYNTHER TELLS me that she lives next door to an abattoir. She recounts a recent experience with a load of cattle. They had been left there by the owner over the weekend with no feed and as much water as a dog would drink in a day. She got on the phone to the owner and told him that if he didn’t come around with some feed and water, she’d do it and bill him. He came. I had gone to Central Queensland to interview Lyn Gynther and Tom King about their first-hand experiences. Lyn, from around Warwick, is a fighter for animals but she was also a killer of animals as a former roo shooter. Tom King from Cunnamulla is also outspoken for wildlife these days while still a licensed and sometimes practicing roo shooter. To be accurate, he’d like to be a roo shooter who can still make some income in an arena the kangaroo industry and state and national governments insist is sustainable wildlife management. Given his unusual outspokenness he’s also been pushed off properties and called crazy; or lying for breaking the tradition that demands conformity and silence towards outsiders – characteristic of many communities, particularly rural communities, in Australia as elsewhere. But with an intractable drought pitting domestic stock graziers against the commercial kangaroo ‘harvesting’ business, let alone wildlife welfare advocates, things have been breaking out into the news. From the kangaroo industry’s perspective the wildlife ‘resource’ is being wiped out.  Tom in particular has interested local journalists by fingering as a major culprit the kilometres of cluster fencing nominally aimed at stopping wild dogs that maul sheep. But the fences also cut across remaining wildlife corridors to water and to opportunistic forage. Both Lyn and Tom told me about the destruction being rained down on kangaroos and wallabies and, more quietly, emus, by a state government mitigation program to help the graziers. This entails generous open season permits to shoot macropods for three years being issued for 2017–2020. ‘Mitigation’ has in some places opened the door for recreational shooters being invited onto grazing properties to blast away at any wild-living animal unfortunate enough to be caught up by the fencing maze. This is happening on Mitchell Grass plains interspersed with mulga and Gidgee native tree belts where there has been conversion since the mid-1990s from sheep to frequently opportunistic cattle grazing – a situation that local and state politicians in 2018 herald as starting to reverse itself thanks to the fencing. They have hailed the move back to sheep as the newest saviour for outback communities like Cunnamulla. Back to tradition is a time-honoured Australian response to a challenging environment. Drought and now climate change WHAT SHOULD BE predictable drought, (it’s happened since colonial days), has been intensified and made less predictable by present-day climate change. Six-, seven-year or longer drought now frames a renewed war on wildlife as paddocks lie bare of forage. It reads like a 21st century replay of the colonial annihilation of the native inhabitants from ‘private property’ that new settlers claimed across the landscape. Talking to the current settlers, long-standing myths, demonization, and false facts soon emerge regarding remaining kangaroo mobs, complicated again by the activities of the commercial harvesters. For example, recent policies to target only male animals (to get around the bad public relations

Share this page What has AWPC been up to? Committee Report Hello friends and members of AWPC, Here’s what we’ve been doing in the past six months. Late in 2022 AWPC, partnering with Animals Australia, commissioned a national media advertising campaign on the theme ‘STOP the horror trade’, ‘World’s biggest land-based wildlife slaughter’ (what Australia does with kangaroos). In Canberra, in consultation with AWPC, Save Canberra’s Kangaroos are also using direct advertising messages in print and electronic media against the ACT government’s shameful kangaroo ‘cull’, while continuing to observe and record the activities of officials and shooters on the killing fields. The 2023 killing started again on the 12 June. Lend your voice via #savecanberraskangaroos on Facebook. We met with an adviser to federal environment minister Tanya Plibersek regarding their woeful management of Australian biodiversity in regard to the kangaroo species and indeed on the theme of protecting all not yet-endangered Australia wildlife. We hand-delivered some copies of our dossier on the kangaroo hunt: ‘Can you keep looking away?’, plus copies of Maria Taylor’s book ‘Injustice: hidden in plain sight, the war on Australian nature’. We think they heard us? The AWPC committee, with expertise from president Frankie Seymour, wrote submissions to federal and state authorities regarding the biodiversity tragedy, asking that the government use the EPBC act to protect ALL our native species. The submission to Minister Plibersek, in response to her call-out for solutions to assist conservation of Australian biodiversity, outlines paths to action for biodiversity that are available to the federal Environment Minister. Australia has signed international treaties to conserve nature and biodiversity that are not being acted upon. Send your message of care for all wildlife and the critical role they play in biodiversity to the environment ministers, federal and state. AWPC is supporting protection of wildlife efforts at state level – ACT, NSW and Victoria – including in the Sydney metro area where koalas and threatened ecological communities are facing the bulldozer for housing developments. Here on this new site AWPC has made a helpful resource guide which you will find at the top of the page. Please use and share for questions of where you can tie in to conserve our native wildlife and its habitats. Best Wishes,The AWPC Committee, Frankie, Joanna, Maria We are interested in your stories of co-existence and sharing with wildlife. Do you have something you wish to share? Please let us know by sending a summary of your story to our contact page and we’ll work with you to post it.

Share this page The Healing Power of Animals: Moon Bear Has a Place Source:  https://marcbekoff.com/ This guest essay was written by Kyle Warner, an accomplished artist, writer, and former student of Marc Bekoff in the Transitions program at the Boulder County Jail (Colorado).  My personal hero, teacher, and dear friend, Marc Bekoff, comes to the jail faithfully every Friday to facilitate just one of Jane Goodall’s Roots & Shoots groups. We engage in a lot of profound, meaningful discussions and he helps us to really understand just why animals matter. He also helps us to take part in many causes and worldwide issues between nonhuman animals and humans. With Marc’s help, we have had our voices heard within many discussions, court battles, online debates, and protests. Some of these include whether we should reintroduce wild wolves here in Colorado, how to stop the potential trophy hunting of grizzly bears in Wyoming, what to do about the mass killing of elephants, the injustice of rich people hunting majestic lions for sport, and other similar topics.2 One issue that stands out for me is the moon bear. Since learning about this beautiful crescent-stamped animal, I have felt drawn to them on a deep level. There is an industry in China where people keep them in small cages to harvest bile out of their gall bladders for Traditional Chinese Medicine. With the help of an organization called Animals Asia, these bears have hope. Animals Asia rescues these bears from coffin-like cages, attends to their medical and psychological needs, and provides them sanctuary in their very own paradise. In 2017, I drew a few of these beautiful animals. In one was Jasper, who passed away not long after I took on this project. Also in that drawing was Oscar and BeaRtrice, whom Marc named after his parents. He was happy to share my art with Animals Asia and many throughout the world. Since then, I have had an opportunity to share my art with Jane Goodall, probably one of the most fulfilling moments of the last three years for me. Recently, in one of the other amazing groups I get to attend here at Boulder County Jail, I embarked on a brief vision quest during a guided meditation. The gentle, soft-spoken instructions began with an ascent. Meeting my spirit animal I imagined my conscious awareness being granted liberty from the limitations and confinement of my body I first hovered above myself before floating up to the ceiling, above the jail, higher and higher, hoping to come back with an animal name. I was instructed to fly west toward the Rocky Mountains and to proceed past the foothills, deep into the jagged, snowcapped Rockies. I landed in a clearing, perhaps some sort of valley surrounded by mighty aspens on high mountains. It was an almost-familiar place, but nowhere I’ve been before. Everything was much bigger and the colors more vibrant. Most of the mountain peaks were hiding in the heavens, camouflaged by clouds. Read the full story here

Share this page Why do people expect to feed their dogs or cats on Australian wildlife, specifically kangaroo? Are they informed consumers? … aware of the unavoidable cruelty that goes with this trade and of the possible health risks to humans or pets that comes with eating bushmeat? Here are some realities that consumers might want to weigh up. KANGAROO, IS THE only Australian native animal hunted specifically for the petfood trade. Most meat in petfood comes from offcuts of domesticated animals bred and killed for human consumption. (Remember the shock and revulsion on hearing of racehorses taken to the knackery.) Australia’s national icon is hunted down in most cases by poorly-paid shooters with few employment choices, who slaughter dozens or hundreds a night at pennies-a-carcass on country properties and increasingly in the wildlife’s last refuges, national parks and reserves. To call this trade or it’s non-commercial version “humane” — as those who enable it like to tell the city folk — is just a self-serving fraud. No independent observers monitor the hunt, the motorised pursuit of terrified kangaroo families, the mis-shots and injuries, with animals at times lingering injured for days; no one helps the totally lost mother-dependent joeys. No one watches what happens next either. Partly butchered carcasses are hung in the trays of utes in all temperatures for a short or long trip to a chiller in a paddock, where basic sanitation has been questioned in some instances. Eventually the bodies are processed in a town — minced and stuffed into petfood cans, or sometimes butchered for overseas human consumption while the skins are exported as shoe leather. Victoria and South Australia returning to petfood trade Victoria, where kangaroo species were recovering after a moratorium on the commercial hunt starting in the 1980s, is now back in business with the kangaroo petfood trade enjoying the state government’s blessing along with applause from some farmers. The advantage of petfood is that any species, size, age or condition animal may do. RELATED ARTICLE: Victoria’s petfood plans grow and draw more protest, AWPC. The kangaroo ‘industry’ has switched focus to southern Australia from Queensland and NSW whose killing fields — after decades of commercial slaughter, drought, fire, flood, disease and landholder killing — have population counts flashing red warning signs underscored by poor “harvests” for years now. The South Australian government, where the iconic Red kangaroo has recovered to an extent, is working on a new removal/ ‘management’ plan. Reports are coming through of wallabies going into the mix too. Half-burned Kangaroo Island is not exempt from these plans we hear. Quite apart from the field hygiene conditions, kangaroos, being wild animals, harbour pathogens. Country people don’t often eat kangaroo, citing ‘worms’. The question of what consumers know arose with a recent ABC Rural story reporting on Victorian pet-owners, grief-stricken at the death of their dogs who were fed contaminated petfood linked to a Gippsland knackery.  A quoted pet-owner thought they were feeding ‘pure kangaroo.’ These are not the first dogs to die in a widening petfood scandal. The trail has led to outback supplies. Reportedly the toxic content came via cattle and horse carcasses allegedly mixed with kangaroo. Regulate the petfood industry Pet owners are calling for any kind of regulation of the petfood industry. That is long overdue on health and welfare grounds. At the Bulletin we are animal lovers and dog companions and our hearts go out to the bereaved dog owners caught up in this disaster. Nevertheless, the question remains: how did we and our governments come to consider as ‘normal’ slaughtering our national emblem for petfood, and export sausages and leather? How is this different from the extensive slaughter of koalas (and other marsupials) for skins to export up until the early 20th century? The fate of the koala is now plain to see. The disrespect shown to Australia’s national symbol and some other wildlife confuses overseas visitors. Their tourist list is often topped by a wish to see ‘Skippy’ in the flesh. What they don’t know is that all species of kangaroo, that includes wallabies, have (since colonial settlement) been removed from their habitat, killed on behalf of a European model of stock grazing that was to be grafted onto a misunderstood land. A bounty era of removal was followed by the commercial trade in body parts, starting with skins for export. It grew profitable and developed its own momentum. As readers of the Bulletin know the same attitude of disrespect and killing is a baffling annual event on the nature reserves of Canberra the national capital. City politicians and bureaucrats cite ‘scientific research’. This version of science now gives cover to national park killings elsewhere. Politician and media narratives describe the carnage as an essential Australian on- farm and export business. Australian pet owners and meat eaters therefore have had little encouragement to become informed consumers of their national icon. Time indeed for review of bushmeat sold for human and pet consumption, for regulation as needed, and, most important, a call for renewed respect and co-existence extended to our natural world and to our unique wildlife. More of the factual background to this editorial can be found and fully explored in Maria Taylor’s new documentary book Injustice, hidden in plain sight the war on Australian nature… > More at www.mariataylor.com.au TWO DOG FOODS GUARANTEED NOT TO CONTAIN KANGAROO While preparing this September issue of The District Bulletin, two dog food sources crossed our horizon guaranteed not to contain kangaroo and promising good nutrition too. We have made no independent examination of these food products and are not therefore directly recommending them. But they sound very promising as alternatives or additions in the marketplace so we leave it to you to check out if you want to. And the doggie yogurt press release came with not one but two cute photos that we couldn’t resist sharing below. Gully Road Australian-grown products for dogs. Small business mail order dog-food purveyor based in Victoria with an ethical value frame. See it here. Chobani Daily Dollop lactose-free and digestion boosting yogurt

Share this page FEDERAL GOVERNMENT SHRUG: IS THIS DOG A ‘NATIVE’ YET? A NOTICE WARNING of fox and wild dog baiting in local forests appeared in the Public Notice section of Narooma News, on Wednesday May 26. Animals to be targeted under this program are foxes and wild dogs. Dingoes have been classed as “wild dogs” for the purpose of the scheme, even though as a native animal with an important role to play as an apex predator in the eco-system they should be entitled to protection. EDITORIAL COMMENT: This ABC article (linked here) comes around to recognise the dingo as apex predator but still peppers the report with pastoralist ideas of what is a ‘pest’ to be removed, including the native kangaroos, and what might be allowed to live. Tragically for the already disrupted balance of nature other native animals will also die a hideous, painful death as a result of ingesting 1080 poison. This poison is so damaging to people, birds and animals it has been banned in most other countries of the world. PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) reports that: “1080 is toxic to all living species, including microbes, plants, insects, birds and humans. There are reports that Nazis considered using the poison on Jewish prisoners in concentration camps but decided against it because of danger to the guards.” Fire and drought: let’s follow it with poisoning Hasn’t our wildlife suffered enough death and dislocation as a result of flood, fire and famine over the last few years without being subjected to further pain and loss from such an indiscriminate and dangerous scheme? RELATED ARTICLE:  Poisoned pills showered on burned parks and reserves.  By The Bulletin, and Susan Cruttenden. Are we so little concerned with environmental issues and the fact that Australia already has one of the highest wildlife extinction rates in the world that we allow our state forests to become killing fields for the next four months? So why is this plan being condoned by the state government and accepted by local councils? Presumably it is in response to some farmers complaints about threats to their livestock in areas adjoining state forests, but what exactly is this threat? And aren’t there more humane ways of livestock protection, even if will mean less income for manufacturers of 1080? Domestic dog owners know If you are the owner of a dog that has eaten part of poisoned carrion dropped into your backyard, or of a maremma guardian dog protecting sheep that died in agony you will certainly have an opinion! Animal Rights lawyer, Marilyn Nuske is even challenging the legality of using 1080 poison. As a controversial issue among the relatively few people who know of this scheme, why haven’t the views of animal rights groups, humanitarians, ecologists, scientists and biologists been discussed, debated and publicised before this war on wildlife was  been declared as a fait accompli? Indigenous people for whom the dingo is a totem animal believe we must learn to live in harmony with Nature. In the words of David Attenborough — “It’s surely our responsibility to do everything within our power to provide a planet that provides a home — not just for us — but for all life on earth”.