A remote South Australian outback station on the
featureless plain west of Broken Hill is the unlikely focus of
efforts to spearhead increased red meat exports into disease-ravaged
European markets.
So flat and vast is the Mundi Mundi Plain on
which Mulyungarie station sits, that from Mt Umberumberka across
the border in NSW
near Broken Hill, it is one of the few points on the globe from
which the curvature of the Earth is visible, with the Flinders
Ranges rising above the far distant horizon.
Mulyungarie has become
the showcase for a determined kangaroo industry campaign to bridge
the red meat supply gap to markets
that have
been devastated by first BSE (mad cow disease) and then foot-and-mouth.
The
3300 sq km pastoral spread, owned by the Mutooroo Pastoral Company,
is the country's only authentic and sustainable kangaroo
farm, operating a "paddock-to-plate" supermarket service.
According
to Kangaroo Industry Association development officer John Kelly,
a mad scramble for kangaroo and other game meats
- widely perceived in countries such as France and Germany to
be "clean
and green" alternatives to beef - has left major processors
in the industry struggling to meet a 20% increase in export demand.
However,
the export boost to the kangaroo industry's fortunes has re-opened
an emotive debate between an industry advocating
a sustainable harvest of Australia's estimated 40 million kangaroos
and the animal welfare movement. Representatives of an alliance
of a dozen welfare organisations, including the International
Fund for Animal Welfare, Vegetarians Voice for Animals and the
World
League for the Protection of Animals, recently rallied at Sydney's
Circular Quay to protest increased kangaroo meat exports. They
are also keen to press home to domestic and European consumers
animal welfare claims that kangaroos can harbour a wide range
of parasitic, bacterial, fungal and viral diseases that "even
meat inspection procedures are unlikely to detect".
Spokesman and independent NSW MLC Richard Jones said the welfare
campaign - centred on cruelty and the alleged uncontrolled killing
of predominantly large male and female red kangaroos - remained
an international issue that "will not go away".
But the
welfare movement's credibility on the kangaroo issue was dealt
a damaging blow when German courts convicted film-maker Michael
Born of fraud involving
fabricated footage. Born's material -which included the staging for the camera
of brutal kangaroo hunts - was the basis of a campaign conducted by animal
welfare activists against British supermarkets that sold kangaroo
product.
Activists are being engaged on the scientific front as well.
Among the advocates of a sustainable kangaroo cull is a powerful
partnership headed by the Australian Museum and involving landholders,
research institutions and government.
Known as FATE (Future of Australia's
Total Ecosystems), this group is about to seek funding for
an extensive 300,000 sq km experiment in the western division
of NSW, involving the scaling back of conventional sheep and cattle farming
in favour of sustainable harvesting of native resources, including kangaroos,
in order to increase the economic viability and long-term future of rural communities.
Mulyungarie,
according to overseer Richard Gloster, is God's own grazing
country, with its quick pasture response to rain and plentiful
saltbush, bluebush and
summer grasses such as copper burr and bindi-eye, rating it among the continent's
best pastoral patches.Gloster spends much of his time plying a maze
of red dust tracks on the sprawling run, checking the numerous
bores and tanks,
using an old yard broom to scrub mineral and animal deposits
from troughs
to make the precious liquid more palatable for his conventional
grazing charges - 14,500 merino sheep and a mob of 2600 Hereford
cattle.
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But according to aerial survey work by the University
of New England, Mulyungarie is also host to a mind-boggling 165,000
red kangaroos - the equivalent, in terms of grazing pressure,
of 110,000 sheep.
" I treat kangaroos as a resource, an animal
traditionally treated as vermin that is now as valuable in the
paddock as sheep," Gloster says.
On most nights of the week Gloster's staff shooters John
Rivett and Kevin Heness - among the 4000 people now employed
in the
kangaroo industry - ply the same maze of tracks, dispatching
with a single
shot to the head an annual tally of between 8000 and 10,000
mainly male red kangaroos in the 40kg weight range. The kangaroos
are
then stored 300 at a time in a chiller on
Mulyungarie, before being hauled each week to the Mutooroo
Pastoral Company's processing works in Adelaide, where they
are boned
into saddles, striploins, shanks, butts and legs. "
All of Mulyungarie is easily accessible to the professional shooters,
enabling them to closely monitor the 'roo population and to cull
predominantly mature males," says Stuart Cairns, researcher
with the UNE's School of Biological Sciences. 'We certainly don't
shoot anything that moves," Gloster says.
UNE surveys confirm
that kangaroo numbers on Mulyungarie have increased from 20
per sq km to more than 50 per sq km in the
past eight years.
That increase is in line with a kangaroo population explosion
across Australia, with total numbers fast approaching 40 million.
Expansion of the pastoral industry’s pasture and water infrastructure
has helped make the kangaroo the most numerous large wild land
mammal on Earth. And dingoes, which have traditionally kept kangaroo
numbers in check, have been exterminated from most areas except
central and northern Australia.
UNE studies have determined that kangaroo population densities
in the Blackall district of Queensland are higher than 70 per sq
km, and in parts of the Warrumbungles in NSW, they have reached
extraordinary numbers, with aerial tallies of eastern greys as
high as 200 per sq km. Data collected over a 22-year period by
Environment Australia con-firms that, even with a harvest in excess
of 3 million animals per year, the kangaroo population has consistently
increased.
Scientific data indicates that the present kangaroo population
is higher than at any other time - and that if left uncontrolled,
it would seriously threaten not only the economic viability of
the pastoral industry, but the environmental stability of huge
tracts of the Australian rangeland.
" Merino sheep are more endangered than the red kangaroo," Gloster
says. 'The vegetarian and welfare activists - with illogical viewpoints
generally based mainly on the 'cute and cuddly' factor - do not
know what they are talking about when it comes to kangaroos being
endangered."
Cairns says: "The Mutooroo Pastoral Company is turning the
'roo into something resembling a domestic grazing animal, culling
any surplus males and topping up each night with a few females.
" It is the nearest thing to sustainable kangaroo farming
in Australia. Essentially, the company is lifting the food resource
base for new recruits – animals just leaving the pouch and
the young-at-foot. It is certainly a sustainable harvest."
Says the director of the Australian Museum and a driving force
behind FATE, paleontologist Michael Archer: "Animal liberationists
are a bit like creationists. They are blinkered to viable strategies
with the potential of maximising the likelihood of effective long-term
conservation."
Unless the kangaroo is valued as a resource, Archer warns, "it
is at risk of extinction through general disinterest in its survival,
destruction of its habitat and predator activity". |
By July,
according to Archer, a formal funding proposal is expected to
be drafted for the large-scale FATE trial -probably in the
Lightning Ridge region of north-west NSW - "to find economically
viable solutions to our land management problems through sustainable
utilisation of the natural resources of our environments".
FATE
has whole-of-government support from NSW; with other stakeholders
including the Universities of Sydney, NSW and New England, the
Royal Botanic Gardens, the CSIRO, rural community groups and
Landcare.
"
The goal of the FATE project is to demonstrate, by rural experiment,
how changes in resource management, including sustainable harvest
of kangaroos and other native resources, both plant and animal,
can increase the viable components of biodiversity and increase
the economic viability and long-term future for rural communities," Archer
says.
" To accomplish this goal, we need to begin to downsize
conventional agriculture based on non-Australian species such
as sheep and
cattle, particularly in Australia's vast and marginal rangelands
where land degradation costs - measured by the CSIRO in terms
of reductions in primary productivity per capita per annum - now approach
$5bn per annum.
" For years, paleontologists have understood these messages,
but have not been able to do anything about it. It is now time
for
the organisations that are part of the key to future sustainability
of Australia to pull together. It is time to get out of the CBD
and the research institutions, to get out on the land."
FATE
has been welcomed with open arms by the kangaroo industry, which
also claims support from the Australian Veterinary Association,
the Wildlife Protection Society of Australia and - according
to market research by the Rural Industries Research and Development
Corporation -77% of Australians.
"
A groundswell of opinion is developing that Australia should
develop land management systems utilising free-ranging populations
of the
animals which belong here and are adapted to the environment," the
Kangaroo Industry Association's John Kelly says. "It makes
for enormous environmental wisdom."
Uniform national standards
now ensure protection of the hygiene integrity of kangaroo product
through the processing chain. All
meat processing premises are licensed by meat hygiene authorities,
and subject to the same level of control as conventional abattoirs,
with all production subject to government inspection.
A detailed
RSPCA examination of the animal welfare aspects of commercial
kangaroo harvesting concludes that, conducted correctly,
the harvest
is "or of the most humane forms of animal slaughter possible".
It
is now mandatory for kangaroo shooters to be accredited professionals
who have passed an approved training course in order to ensure
harvest conducted responsibly.
And studies by the CSIRO Division
Human Nutrition have confirmed that kangaroo meat is "lean
or very low fat, low in saturated but high in polyunsaturated
and monounsaturated fat, low moderate
in cholesterol, high in iron. A good source of protein, quick
and easy to cook, tasty and low cost, and clean and green."
Says
Kelly: "Many are now coming the view that kangaroo
production offers a more sustainable method of land use in the
rangeland environment
than grazing sheep or cattle.
" Producing food from the animals and plants that belong here and
are adapted this country makes for enormous environmental wisdom." |
