Dirk Hartog, one of the first Europeans to visit
Australia, wrote in his log book as he sailed away from the west
coast: "This land is cursed, the animals
hop not run, the birds run not fly, and the swans are black not
white".
This view illustrates the polarised attitudes that Australia's
fauna engender. Depending on your leanings, our wildlife are
either an agricultural pest or are sacrosanct and should not
be interfered
with by humans. Neither view recognises that humans have been
managing Australian wildlife - kangaroos in particular - for
more than 40,000
years.
Recent decades have seen the development of a new paradigm
- that we should produce our food from this country's wildlife.
Unfortunately
this is a difficult concept for those who believe that wildlife
are sacred. Many of these, such as Geoff Russell (Australasian
Science August 1999, p.18), are forced to desperate measures
to attempt to denigrate the concept.
Russell selectively quoted
data from the kangaroo Industries Association of Australia's
Web site to suggest that kangaroos
are an economically
unproductive species. He claims that red and grey kangaroos
are small animals producing very little meat. As anyone who
has stood
face-to-face with one will testify, red and grey kangaroo
are, in fact, very large animals. Their actual average yield
of
boneless meat per head is 10-12 kg, not the 2 kg Mr Russell
suggests. His
calculation is based on the amount sold domestically for
human consumption divided by the total take. It does not allow
for
the much larger volume exported and the large amount used
for pet food.
In fact, the kangaroo industry currently produces about 24,000
tonnes of meat annually and can sustainably yield twice that. |
Another trick of those who feel the need to denigrate
calls for an indigenous agriculture is to raise the spectre of
extinction. This fails to acknowledge that there is probably
no evidence of any Australian land mammal being driven to extinction
by commercial utilisation. The bulk of extinctions are caused
by habitat destruction and predation or competition from introduced
species. In fact, the kangaroo industry has been intensively
harvesting
kangaroos for the past 25 years yet there are now more of the
commercially harvested species than ever before.
With a total
population exceeding 30 million, the commercially
harvested kangaroo species is one of the most common large
wild land mammals on Earth despite 25 years of intensive harvesting!
Could this be because the management systems that have been
implemented
to ensure the harvest is sustainable also ensure the wellbeing
of the population as a whole?
Other arguments are that an indigenous
agriculture would never produce enough food to feed the nation.
I must have missed
something here, because I don't know of anyone who has ever
suggested that
it would. For example, the proponents of kangaroo harvesting
as a more environmentally friendly livestock production system
only
ever suggest that this system should be implemented in the
arid rangelands. The intent is not to get rid of every sheep
or cow
from the face of the country, but rather to decrease the
reliance on these exotic species in the fragile arid areas where
they
cause the most ecological damage.
Then again we often hear
the argument that we shouldn't eat meat at all; that vegetarianism
is a more environmentally
friendly diet. |
I doubt that anyone who has anything to do with
Australian agriculture believes that this view stacks up. Wide-scale
cereal cropping, for example, contributes considerably more to
environmental problems such as soil erosion, soil salinity and
soil structural problems than grazing livestock. For every kilogram
of wheat produced in Australia it has been calculated that we
lose 7 kg of precious topsoil. On the other hand, every kilogram
of
kangaroo
meat causes minimal topsoil loss.
No one can disagree that the
environmental sustainability of our arid rangelands needs
urgent attention. A larger-scale harvest of a freee-ranging,
but managed,
wild kangaroo population as an alternative to sheep grazing offers part of
the
solution to the environmental problems of this region.
The new century may
see the current Australian civilisation decide that our wildlife
are neither vermin, nor sacred, but rather something in between.
Like
the Aboriginal civilisation we have supplanted, we may decide that we
should produce our food from some wildlife species, in some areas.
John
Kelly is Development Manager for the Kangaroo Industries Association
of Australia.
(Australian Science, October 1999) |
