ACT’s misguided lethal “management” of kangaroos

The decision to kill nearly 2000 eastern grey kangaroos across 10 nature reserves is a bid to “protect biodiversity and minimise impact on critical grassland and woodlands”, according to ACT “ecologist” Daniel Iglesias.

It’ cruel and blatant hypocrisy.

Kangaroos are native animals and that’s why they should be safe on “nature reserves”! Protect biodiversity – when they are biodiversity and not a risk to “critical grasslands and woodlands”! Do these junk scientists think they are feral pests?

Kangaroos need Wildlife corridors through which they can move and live.

It is human impact that is causing imbalance and grief to Australia’s kangaroos. Have we learned anything? Maryland

The Great Eastern Ranges Corridor would stretch from just outside Melbourne to the Atherton Tableland in far north Queensland. Call for giant east coast green corridor,16 Jul 2010.

Great Eastern Ranges Corridor

A New South Wales Government report has recommended a 2,800-kilometre conservation corridor be established along Australia’s east coast. The Great Eastern Ranges Corridor (GER) would stretch from just outside Melbourne to the Atherton Tableland in far north Queensland.

A report issued by the New South Wales Environment Department says the zone contains 64 per cent of endangered plants and 59 per cent of endangered animals in the state. National Parks spokesman Ian Pulsford says plants and animals need a large landscape to help them survive as the climate changes.

“Plants and animals don’t necessarily respect the boundaries of the national parks – they need much bigger habitats. We need the whole landscape functioning well and contributing to conservation of our precious biodiversity.”

Environmental scientist Professor Brendan Mackey, who wrote the report, says the corridor is “incredibly important from a national perspective. It contains the ecosystems which are most important in terms of providing fresh water to our major cities,” he said.

The Great Eastern Ranges corridor extends 3,600 km along the Great Dividing Range and Great Eastern Escarpment from the western Victoria to far north Queensland. It contains Australia’s longest chain of mountainous landscapes and areas of intact habitat. Spanning an area of 33,000,000 hectares and covering 14 bio-regions, the corridor contains three World Heritage Areas, the world’s greatest concentration of primitive rainforest flowering plants, and Australia’s largest and tallest old growth forests.

National Parks Association of NSW, NPA, has been instrumental in shaping the vision of the GER Initiative over many years. They recognise that through connectivity conservation ensures that national parks, travelling stock routes and other key habitats form part of a healthy, connected landscape and society.

The GER corridor forms the watershed and headwaters for the major rivers in eastern Australia, directing runoff either towards the coast or inland. It ranges widely in elevation, and includes Australia’s highest mountain (Mt Kosciuszko – 2228 metres).

The prospect of corridors creating problems is well recognised by scientists. It was an issue raised by the CSIRO in a submission to the 2012 Draft National Wildlife Corridors Plan. The NSW Environment Trust, an independent body established by the NSW government to fund conservation, will no longer fund new corridor projects until the risks have been assessed by asking a question: “Will connectivity exacerbate the spread of weeds, pest species, diseases or catastrophic events (such as fire or floods)?”

Risks of wildlife corridors?

Rather than feral animals and noxious weeds, the threat to corridors are aggressive infrastructure and planning agencies in three levels of Government, and the land development/housing industry.  The urban myths of balanced development and unsustainable offsets can no longer be credible.

Corridors are a long term tool for persistence of species and populations, provided that the threats to native species that they potentially facilitate are addressed properly.  the AWPC support the position that the benefits they provide should outweigh the negatives.

Where are the real scientists and ecologists defending ACT’s native kangaroos?

Canberra, the ACT and adjacent areas in NSW, are ‘hot spots’ for motor vehicle collisions involving kangaroos. NSW police have attended far more collisions in the Yass-Goulburn-Queanbeyan area than anywhere else, including other NSW country towns and rural districts. In Canberra, rangers commonly record more than 1,000 roadside kangaroo attendances per year, and estimate there are twice as many collisions as attendances. This is not reducing the kangaroo populations, nor is the annual increase in the number of collisions due merely to expansion of Canberra and increased numbers of cars. The rate of motor vehicle collisions involving kangaroos (per registered vehicle) has been increasing significantly.

We suggest the so-called “conservation” killing of kangaroos, the hypocritical concern for biodiversity and the health of grasslands,  is pure green-washing, thinly disguising a more mundane reason for the mass shootings!  It’s about insurance claims and vehicle accidents.  It threatens urban expansion!

Sadly, there are few genuinely independent ecologists working in Australia today, but those who are independent all seem to agree that Eastern Grey Kangaroos are in deep trouble. Given the availability of well-known non-lethal kangaroo management methods and the lack of wildlife corridors, it’s time for ACT residents to reflect on whether the moral direction provided by ministers Rattenbury, Corbell and Barr is really what they are prepared to rely on. – Professor Steve Garlick, Bungendore, NSW.

The ACT government cannot come up with a more humane way of regulating our kangaroo population than by giving them the bullet?

One of the Animal Justice Party’s policies on kangaroos is to:

-Buy land from landholders in areas where wildlife corridors are needed for kangaroos to traverse to safe locations.

AND

-Mandate overpasses, underpasses and exclusion fences and wildlife corridors for new developments where kangaroos and other wildlife live, along with more road signs warning people to slow down at dawn and dusk and drive carefully in road kill hotspot areas.

You can either download, print and post one of the following forms in Microsoft Word or Acrobat PDF format to:
“Animal Justice Party”
PO Box 1010
Strawberry Hills
NSW 2012