Vegan Food & Living - October 2017

72 VEGAN FOOD & LIVING OCTOBER

Viva!’s Justin Kerswell

reveals the unpleasant facts

about the way kangaroos

meet a grisly end

I

f you were to fi nd

yourself in the

depths of Australia’s

beautiful, vast Outback

at dusk, you might be

shocked out of your reverie

by an unexpected sound – the crack of

a rifl e. Often many hours away from the

nearest town, kangaroos are hunted in

what is the largest massacre of land-

based wild animals on the planet today.

Perhaps surprisingly, this bloody trade

in wildlife is partly driven by British

retailers keen to sell consumers ‘novelty

meat’. Yet, as with all supermarket meat

products, the packaging doesn’t even

begin to tell the whole story.

Kangaroos are not farmed. They

simply can’t be, because they fi nd it

so stressful that their muscles literally

waste away. They are shot at from

the back of trucks in the wild. Many

kangaroos are miss-shot and have

their jaws or arms blasted off. Females

will often have a baby joey in pouch

and an adolescent at foot. The babies

are pulled from their dying mother’s

pouch and brained or decapitated. The

older young are meant to be shot, but

many escape to fall victim to predators

without the protection of their mothers.

Neither of these young animals are even

used by the industry, but are simply

discarded as trash. Some estimates put

the number of these dependent young

killed and dumped at over one million

a year.

6 .8 million kangaroos were

earmarked for slaughter in 2015

(latest available fi gures). Since 2001

(compared to 2015) there has been an

overall drop of 12,577,598 kangaroos in

the areas where they are

hunted – according to the

Australian government’s

own fi gures.

Although often called a

‘cull’, the annual slaughter

of kangaroos is not about removing

sick or weak animals. Because it is

commercially driven, shooters tend

to target the largest kangaroos as

they yield the most meat and leather.

This taking of mature animals has a

devastating eff ect on mobs of kangaroos

and can remove healthy genetic lines

that are needed to ensure future

generations thrive.

Booting it out

After a decade of campaigning, Viva!

persuaded football giants Adidas and

Nike to phase out kangaroo leather

from their lines of soccer boots in

2010-2011. In the late 1990s, our

campaigns saw kangaroo meat removed

Death in

the Outback

The hidden kangaroo

killing industry

JUSTIN

KERSWELL

Viva! is a charity

working to

promote veganism

and to end

animal suffering.

Justin Kerswell is

Campaigns Manager

and Deputy

Director for Viva!

http://www.viva.org.uk

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