Eat more kangaroos to help save the planet, scientists tell Aussies
Shot by the millions, kangaroos are the victims of the planet’s largest annual kill of terrestrial wildlife, reviled as farming pests, loathed as the harbinger of drought, and mown down by the hundreds each night on outback roads.
Australians are being asked to change their deeply conflicted relationship with the kangaroo, which, despite centuries of persecution, still features on the nation’s coat of arms and national carrier Qantas’s planes.
Scientists – worried about the growing amounts of greenhouses gases emitted in the form of methane by the nation’s huge amounts of cattle and sheep – are urging Australians to no longer see the kangaroo as a pest but as a cleanliving, largely emission-free source of food that could reduce the nation’s dependence on traditional meats and help counter climate change.
Sheep and cattle produce 11 per cent of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. Kangaroos, because of the design of their stomachs, emit very little greenhouse gases.
An added bonus is that their meat tends to be leaner and healthier than traditional farmed meats, largely because they are free-roaming wild animals.
Can Australians – and the world – be convinced to substitute kangaroo for traditional meats?
Nancy Cushing, an environmental historian at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, has long studied the fractious culinary relationship Australians have with the kangaroo.
‘‘It’s really bloody-looking – I think a lot of people are intimidated by it,’’ she said of kangaroo meat while pointing out that its low-fat, protein-rich qualities make for a healthier option.
Cushing believes others will be hesitant, because kangaroo has long been a staple food of poor Aborigines and kangaroos are still considered pests by many Australians.
‘‘For some people, it would be like eating rats or something beyond the pale that is looked upon as an impediment to progress and just not the sort of thing that you want to eat,’’ she said.
Professor George Wilson, a zoologist and commercial pilot who uses his flying skills to count kangaroo populations from the air, is in the vanguard of those pushing for Australians, especially farmers, to learn to love the animal.
‘‘How dumb is it to continue to regard kangaroos as pests when they’ve got all these other attributes?’’ he said.
While about three million kangaroos are slaughtered each year – primarily by farmers, but also by the fledgling kangaroo meat industry – little of their meat finds it way to the dinner table. Some are killed for pet food, others for their leather, but many are left to rot where they fall.
Wilson believes the kangaroo population – which is at least 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million – could easily handle a reduction in numbers and the level of official protection.
He and a group of like-minded scientists want Australia to adopt a changed relationship that would see farmers become the guardians of reduced numbers of wild kangaroos, in the same manner that North American estates are responsible for bison or Scottish landholders are for deer. The animals are hunted, but have a commercial value which incentivises land holders to better care for them.
Adoption of the model in Australia would require prices for kangaroo meat to markedly improve.
Prices are currently in the doldrums at about A60 cents a kilogram, only a 10th of what a farmer can fetch for a good-sized wild goat.
For Australia’s largest kangaroo meat processor, Ray Borda, there is one very hopeful sign: his highest sales now come in the leadup to national day celebrations in late January.
‘‘Australians are patriotic – they’re now eating the national emblem on Australia Day,’’ he said.