Animal-defence lawyers leveled this verdict on examining an ‘independent’ review that unsurprisingly gives high marks to the national capital’s kangaroo-killing program. The Australian Capital Territory government simultaneously kicked off another year of carnage in Canberra, the Bush Capital. Hired guns shoot adult and juvenile animals on city nature reserves (or the latter escape, traumatized, to possibly become road kill or fox food) and the contract killers are instructed to bash pouch joeys to death. They call it a ‘conservation cull’ – propaganda words to manufacture consent from the public.
Likewise, Australian state and territory governments aim weapons of war indiscriminately against some fellow species in the interest of land grabs, economic profit, or both. That means, bullets, poisons, blunt force trauma and denial of food and shelter on what was once the animals’ home ranges. In Canberra, the propaganda against kangaroo species living on urban reserves is sold to the public in a framework of ‘science’, the subject of above review.
For more than a decade the Canberra public has heard a revolving set of reasons from politicians and the territory bureaucracy – including inhouse and allied contract scientists – regarding why, really, those kangaroos grazing on reserves, (and delighting visitors) must be shot. One popular refrain: we have to kill them before they starve. The narrative has now settled on the evidence-free claim that these marsupials damage the homes of other wildlife, when in fact the ecological truth is just the opposite.
The aim from the start was to ‘improve’ the nature of Australia for commerce, a back paddock of resources for the colonizing nation – accompanied by wholesale disinterest in understanding the ecological systems and the co-dependence of Australian fauna and flora. State and federal governments have led the charge on behalf of commercial interests and their long-held beliefs, setting dangerous examples for the public of disrespect and impunity to kill.
There is much to catch up on – including an understanding of the key ecological roles played today in grassy woodland ecosystems by the remaining large kangaroo species, by wombats, and by some ground-dwelling birds, as other ‘landscape engineers’ have become statistics in Australia’s shameful extinction crisis.
With another government reserve ‘cull’ in June and July, below is the Canberra story that we published in 2023 as part of a campaign to raise awareness of Australia’s horror show regarding kangaroos The essentials of this story, sadly, remain unchanged in 2024.
The AWPC suggests peaceful and compassionate people might consider letting the ACT government know they will not support Canberra and the ACT with visits or purchases while government demonization and warfare aimed at native animals continues. (Dingos too are killed, poisoned, by the ACT, often using kangaroo carcasses as bait). Overseas and interstate visitors might reconsider their tourist options while Australia as a whole kills its iconic native animals as ‘pests’ and for shoe leather and pet food.
State governments and Tourism Australia would love to hear from you!
