It makes for good pictures on the ABC for television, to see kangaroos being herded up and then euthanased. And people being interviewed and saying they've never seen anything worse. And there's talk that activists have got actions planned for the defence site in Canberra today. And one of the stupid proposals is that you relocate the kangaroos.
Well on this one also, the Federal Government and the Defence Department are 100 per cent correct. We're talking about 3,000 kangaroos, can you believe, on a 15 hectare site.
They breed all year round. And they can increase their population by up to 400 per cent in just five years.
Yet again, the animal rights mob are proving that they are the ones that should be herded up with the kangaroos.
All this talk about leaving a bloody stain on the national character is absolute nonsense. And as one report said today, it's funny that there are no reports of animal rights activists gathering on the Snowy Mountains Highway.
A few years ago scientists set up a study along a 20 kilometre stretch of that road to examine road kill, and in ten months 400 eastern grey kangaroos, the same that they're getting rid of in the suburb of Belconnen, 400 of them were dead on the side of the road.
And the argument that this is like Japan slaughtering whales is laughable. One is an endangered species. The kangaroo is anything but.
The national kangaroo population is almost 40 million.
There's a quota in Queensland of 3.8 million, usually revised upwards, for the number of kangaroos that can be removed each year. The quotas are rarely met.
And kangaroos are a nightmare in New South Wales. As one report says today, kangaroos are cute, but so are rabbits. And we kill them too, when their numbers explode and they start degrading the environment.
As that report says, there are many things in this world that deserve every ounce of outrage and anger that we can muster. Worrying about sedating 400 kangaroos before euthanasing them is not one of them.
What's happening in Canberra, in spite of what you might see on the television and the emotive language associated with it, and in spite of the protesters, what you're seeing is pure and simple pest control.
The protesters should direct their energies to something more worthwhile.
