Australia will have snipers shoot thousands of camels to conserve water

True but I believe that due to some Australian legal idiosyncrasies, the sniping of humans involves more red tape then that of feral camels.

This doesn't feel like a fair response because the article isn't saying "cull the camels because there isn't enough water for humans and camels to be able to drink, it's us or them". Also that statistic will be incredibly skewed for the urbanised nature of most of the Australian population, whilst the article is talking about a remote Aboriginal community (of ~2300 people over 102650km).

Some quotes:

> A recent feral-camel-population boom is exacerbating the need for water, threatening damage to infrastructure and putting communities in Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara, an Aboriginal district, at risk...

> “Some people, in this sort of weather, are unable to put their air conditioners on, for fear that the animals are going to attack their air conditioners for their moisture.”

(Honestly, to me, this is a very first-world-problem feeling reason... But it's too fun to not quote :-) )

> The DEW noted that camels who do not survive the extreme arid conditions also put locals at risk. > > “In some cases, dead camels have contaminated important water sources and cultural sites,” the spokesperson said.

> “And in that time we’ve got to feed them . . . The reality is, we just can’t do that,” he said.

The article is a bit dishonest feeling saying:

> professional snipers will take to helicopters to hunt 4,000 to 5,000 camels in South Australia’s remote northwest, adjacent to the wildfires that have raged since September in New South Wales

The closest NSW fire is something like 1650km away, and that's being fairly generous.

They plan to kill ~5,000 camels, which consume an average of 30 gallons of water per day, that comes out to about 150K gallons per day.

With 22 million Australians, if they reduce their daily water consumption by 0.0068 gallons, these camels would have enough to drink and be allowed to live.

I would also be genuinely curious whether the water usage numbers have reduced as the east cost (the majority of the population) has been impacted by long droughts since that research.