Animal rights groups wage Web war on kangaroo cull

By GREG ANSLEY

CANBERRA - The night is split by the sudden glare of a spotlight, a shot rings out and a kangaroo slumps to the ground.

It is a scene repeated dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times at night across Australia as shooters harvest the national icon for an industry worth more than $A200 million ($250 million) a year.

But now Skippy is fighting back in cyberspace.

As the Olympics loom closer, an Internet war is being waged by animal welfare groups outraged by what they see as a brutal massacre.

In yet another byplay on a Games overloaded with controversy and the attachment of myriad causes, graphic portrayals of kangaroo shooting are being beamed at a global audience.

The Games organisers have added fuel to the fire by announcing they intend to serve kangaroo meat.

Pat O'Brien, a Queenslander who heads the Wildlife Protection Association of Australia, fumes that the Games promotes the platypus, echidna and kookaburra as mascots while preparing to serve the nation's most recognisable animal on a plate.

"They have picked on three wildlife icons that are not being commercially used. That is significant, I think, because they wanted to avoid conflict - then they go and do something stupid like bring the kangaroo meat in."

The campaign sends shivers up the spine of the kangaroo industry, tourism promoters and diplomats.

In the 1980s, as kangaroo exports started to boom, the ABC produced Goodbye Joey, a graphic documentary that effectively killed off the key German market.

A decade later, the International Fund for Animal Welfare hired a camera crew to film a rogue shooter performing acts of cruelty - he was later prosecuted - and pumped out letters of protest to senior Australian politicians and tourism officials.

After a further attack in Germany, diplomatic, environmental and agiculture officials produced their own publicity to counter what the Foreign Affairs and Trade Department saw as a "threat to ... Australia's international reputation."

In Britain, activists warned food giant Tesco they would run newspaper advertisements alleging the clubbing of joeys and other atrocities if it did not remove kangaroo meat from its shelves.

Tesco resisted, but dropped kangaroo, ostrich and crocodile meat with the explanation that demand for exotic meats had nose-ived because of the Mad Cow disease scare.

Now, with the global media focusing on all things Australian, activists are using the Net to turn the spotlight on kangaroo shooters.

"Are we going to use the Olympics - absolutely," O'Brien says.

"We will be using the Internet as much as we can to talk to people overseas about kangaroo meat and why they should not be eating it."

His organisation's Website alone is getting more than 50 hits a day, with a flood of e-mails - mostly from the US - protesting against a harvest that kills about four million kangaroos a year. Too many, says O'Brien, and too cruel.

John Kelly, development manager of the Kangaroo Industry Association, points in response to volumes of studies and reports in defence of the kangaroo harvest.

Kelly's association has its own Website offering a blend of industry news, fact sheets, scientific and environmental endorsements - and low-fat, heart-friendly kangaroo recipes.

But against the comparatively dry diet of Kelly's site, O'Brien has the imagery of baby joeys and the pulling power of the likes of Sir Paul McCartney and Brigitte Bardot.

"Without reservation I support the Australian groups fighting to save the kangaroo," says McCartney's endorsement. "The killing is a disgrace - cruel and entirely profit-motivated."

Bardot agrees: "The destruction of these totally inoffensive animals is revolting and unjust."

How can the report of the Senate rural and regional affairs committee or Professor Michael Archer, director of the Australia Museum, compete with that?

Even within Australia, the battle for hearts is furious and unclear.

The kangaroo industry uses research to show that 77 per cent of Australians support the commercial use of kangaroos, and more than half have tried roo meat.

But market research quoted by a Senate inquiry into the harvest also reported the public's negative perception of the industry.

Activists challenge official estimates of kangaroo levels, saying kill totals are higher than commercial quotas and that the targeting of large males is reducing the size and genetic strength of the five species allowed to be harvested.

O'Brien says the methodology of the official count is suspect, but he has no population count of his own and admits most of his evidence is anecdotal. A count was "something we have been thinking about."

Retorts Kelly: "That is liberationists for you." He uses official estimates supported by environmental agencies and such august bodies as the Government science organisation CSIRO.

These figures, backed by leading environmentalists and the Senate, claim that not only is the cull quota sustainable, but it has improved the kangaroo population's health, reduced pressure on the environment and made economic use of a natural resource.

Activists say the cull is inhumane, that the public has been misled into believing kangaroos are pests and that the clubbing to death of orphaned joeys is commonplace.

The industry and watchdogs reply that the sector is strictly regulated, that animal welfare is policed and that an independent audit about to be carried out by the RSPCA will show activists are misrepresenting the cull.

On the Internet, the battle continues.

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