They Shoot Kangaroos | Hacker News Reader

They Shoot Kangaroos

outsideonline.com

18 pointsswimduck21 comments

Surprised the headline is truncated; it's a reference to

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Shoot_Horses,_Don't_They%3F_(novel)

It's a pity kangaroos have to be culled but it's a fact of life.

Aside - our family had a magnificent kangaroo rug made from animals that Dad had hunted. Still had a few bullet holes.

More appropriate title: Idiots get in the way of government environmental sustainability engineers. Those engineers are removing a pest. Let them do their job.

Here here.

To non Australians, they seem like cute puppies that bounce, but in reality they're a huge pest and terrifying when they appear out of nowhere on the highway.

When driving from Kalgoorlie (a remote mining town in the middle of the desert) to Perth (the capital city in that state) one must complete the 6 hour drive across featureless plains during the daylight hours only.

Trying to drive at night will result in kangaroos approaching your headlights, then your passenger vehicle is hitting a 200lb (90kg) mammal whilst driving at 70mph (110kmh) which is never going to end well.

Yowch! Even with bull bars, that's never going to be fun

Aren't they called roo bars in Oz?

Both, depends on your pedigree I think. I hear either as much as the other.

And the problem is, because they're so tall they don't even hit the crumple zone, they go straight through the windsheild

I once (stupidly) drove through (unfamiliar) country Victoria to catch a morning flight at Tullamarine. I was about 3 hours drive away so I started at 3 am.

By 4am I was driving 60-70km/hr along a single carriageway when suddenly my car was flanked on either side by a mob of a dozen roos matching my speed pushing me to the center of the road. If my window was open I could have easily stroked the head of the nearest one.

I knew they couldn't keep up for long so I just tried to match their speed before they eventually started to slow and peel off, at which point I took off in front.

Was probably a couple of minutes but felt like half an hour.

Had a car been coming in the other direction we'd probably all be dead.

Moral of the story; Get a hotel.

Like deer. Many urbanites think they're magical, majestic, beautiful animals.

Some animals you can kill, some you cant, the hypocrisy of people. If this article offends you, think about where you live and how many animals used to live there, or the amount of deforestation caused to make your food, be it vegan or not.

Kangaroo hides don't have sweat glands and the proteins have more width-wise linkages compared to cows.

This makes their leather very strong, even when thin, which makes it a prized material in protective wear like motorcycle gloves where it provides far more feel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangaroo_leather

>Although most species of macropod are protected from hunting by law, a small number of the large-sized species which exist in high numbers can be hunted by commercial hunters

"Fletcher goes full kangaroo, drooping his head, hunching his shoulders, dangling his hands from his chest and zigzagging slowly forward."

This is my new dance, the 'full kanga.'

You never go full kanga.

Stopped reading at the word "radicalized"

"pest tag", the most useful thing since the sliced bread. Justifying all our destroying ecosystems dreams since the dodo, moa and tasmanian tiger.

Buy now the "pest tag" argument and take to your home also the "but, there is still lots and lots of tuna" and "nobody thinks in the billions of cattle killed by wolves each saturday" tags for free.

Except this pest is so numerous they over-eat an area, ruining that area and starving all other grazing animals, then starve themselves so they must expand to conquer other areas or die out themselves. Here they're expanding.

You use the word "ecosystem" so you must realise it's a system which requires balance, not just blindly saying "don't kill this animal".

The people behind these culls are nature conservationists considering the entire ecosystem and all its participants, not moronic hunters eradicating a species for trophies or sport.

Kangaroos in Australia are like deer in north america. Almost all of Australia has no people on it. Only the few cities along the coast. Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Darwin, Adelaide, and the gold coast. Look at a map and look at all the land not occupied.

Your knee jerk reaction does not coincide with real world data. Kangaroos are abundant and very powerful animals.

They are very different to your examples of dodo, moa, and tasmanian tigers. Before European settlement, the population was largely limited by water access. With farming, there are numerous small dams across the landscape and irrigation. The population has exploded in the last 200 years.

Oh, I'm not consider myself a total jerk, but let me show you now some interesting examples of what we could call the gray 'pest business' area:

In the North of Spain the iberian subspecies of gray wolves are strictly protected but still can be legally culled in special cases. The wolf was extinct in the basque country about 1950 and after the law any recently extinct native species must to be reintroduced ASAP. For some strange reason this is translated as an active minory supported by the government killing actively any wolf daring to enter in the autonomous community, splitting effectively the normal distribution area of an endangered species in two northern subpopulations since them. The press often show photos of the local hero smiling with the killed animal because, as they remember us constantly, "wolves are vermin".

http://www.eldiario.es/norte/euskadi/inadmisible-sector-mino...

Now wild boar damages are so high and kill so many people in crash cars, that the same basque government is buying wolf urine with the hope to keep the boars out of the roads. Doing the less possible with the maximum money of the taxpayers.

Out of the basque country, wolf cubs and adults are also being culled systematically inside national parks. Yes, is a National Park and cattle have all priority over pests. Inside our particular northern yellowstone you can see domestic goats, sheeps, thousands and thousands of cows, and even roaming free pigs and chicken. We have also some old trees, zero saplings of three years, and I can guarantee that you will have a hard time finding an exposed grass of more than 6 mm high.

No one of the spanish National Parks is thinking seriously about to reintroducing the locally extinct wolves. No matter how high the prevalence of bovine tuberculosis in wild boar and wild roe deer.

Scotland: No trees growing naturally. 100% sappling mortality unless barricated. European Lynx reintroduction is out of discussion; not even in isolated islands or as a single experiment. Blocked forever by the powerful "pest card" by farmers and hunters. If we could ask the scottish plants its definition of pest, they will probably say "sheeps, sheeps roaming free everywhere".

Cougars in Argentina: Kill it with fire. Yes, they are protected. Salmons and minkes in argentina: not pest; dollars. Free pass to all lakes and streams, even if some native species, err... sorry, native pests, will be extinct in the process.

(to be continued...)

Second part: Show me the money

"In 2000 Asturian sheep farmers put in compensation claims for more sheep killed by wolves than actually existed in the Principality".

The two last spanish ministers of environment had repeatly tried to convince Brussels that all was plenty of wolves so they should be hunted also in the south. Each year between 140 and 300 wolves are tendered to hunters

http://elpais.com/elpais/2012/03/27/inenglish/1332871020_305...

And here is this bright jewel of internet sarcasm that you surely will enjoy: Lets save the relict population of tasmanian wolves in Andalusia:

https://scontent-mad1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xlt1/v/t1.0-9/s...

Although there is no proof, in the last decades, of thylacine presence in Andalusia, it is estimated that 8 reproductor groups can be still survive in Sierra Morena.

The project perspectives are good, is easy to harmonize the interests of hunters and livestock keepers with a species that do not exists.

We want to improve the social perception of tasmanian tigers among citizens. No reintroductions, or real measures against the causes of their extinction are planned.

The context of this is about the new 12 millions of euro granted to "improve the social perception" of wolves in the South of Spain. Since 2012 not a single iberian wolf was caught in the trap cameras deployed to census the also hightly endangered lynx, but Spain said this year in Brussels that there are 50 iberian wolves in two subpopulations instead, the same number as in the last 30 years. A growing number of people think instead that they are locally extinct by now

http://infoandalucia.com/ii-plan-de-recuperacion-del-lobo-ib...

Even if one or two wolves miraculously remain they will be highly hybridiseed with feral dogs currently. But as long as Brussels do not ask inconvenient questions about why Spain is not just taking some of the 300 auctioned wolves that will be hunted in the North and traslocate this animals to the National Parks in the South for a small fraction of this money, all will be OK.

As I said I'm not a total jerk. I do not mind if some kangaroos need to be culled as long as is done correctly. Is the common rethoric what is a problem to me, because often it just covers an abuse or a scam (I'm not saying that this is the case here).

If Australia need to keep off kangaroos out of children play areas, I'm fine with the idea. Maybe some strategically situed realistic statues of dingos or thylacines could do a much better job for less money. Who knows?. Children at least will enjoy it. Just lets try it and see what happens.

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