Drought and Kangaroos......can they Survive this Time?

Farmers battling Australia's worst drought on record are shooting cattle they can't feed, abandoning dustbowl farms to search for grass with hungry livestock, and hand-feeding animals on moonscape paddocks. The worst drought in 100 years has left farmers the length and breadth of Australia looking to the sky and praying for rain. Wildlife has been devastated, and savage, destructive wildfires in every State, especially during 2006-2007, has further reduced populations.

Australia is the driest inhabited continent even though some areas have annual rainfall of over 1200 millimetres. Our climate is highly variable - across the continent generally, as well as from year-to-year. A drought is a prolonged, abnormally dry period when there is not enough water for users' normal needs. Drought is not simply low rainfall; if it was, much of inland Australia would be in almost perpetual drought. Because people use water in so many different ways, there is no universal definition of drought.

Wildlife suffers first. Rural wildlife populations are already depleted due to land clearing, shootng, poison ingestion and roadkills. Kangaroos have been particlularly badly hit. Incessant and unsustainable commercial shooting has decimated kangaroo populations throughout rural Australia. When farmers remove stock from their paddocks because of lack of feed, many of them add urea to the water troughs to kill any kangaroos that come to drink.

We hear anecdotal reports from National Parks rangers and other rural residents that shooters are going into Nationl Parks to shoot kangaroos. Many shooters have given kangaroo shooting away, or just shoot at the weekends. Although the Federal Government in 2005 stated we have 25 million kangaroos in Australia, even the shooters can't find them!

The Industy propaganda states that currently kangaroos are starving to death, and it's kinder to shoot them. In fact, behavioral scientists believe that because kangaroos are pretty stress prone, death is simply a matter of shutting down, something like a computer. The oldest and the youngest die first. Young joeys, after they leave the pouch, need green pick to survive. Without it they will die. If the kangaroos can follow the rainstorms, they may survive. Trouble is, kangaroo shooters follow the rain too, knowing there will be kangaroos near the green pick! Size doesnt matter, the minimum weight is 13 kg in NSW, 14 kg in Queensland, hardly old enough to have had one joey.

Drought is a fact of Nature in Australia, and kangaroos have been surviving drought for thousands of years. However nowdays, loss of habitat and extensive, consistent shooting has brought kangaroos to the very edge of extinction, and there is no guarantee that populations will recover from this extended drought.

Research indicates that severe drought affects some part of Australia about once every 18 years. This does not indicate that severe drought regularly and predictably recurs every 18 years; intervals between severe droughts have varied from four to 38 years. There are long historical rainfall records to give a clearer picture of what is 'normal' for an area, and how much variation might be expected. However all that information is now irrelevant in the face of Climate Change.

Whatever, agriculture in Australia has directly contributed to desertifcation and wildlife loss. While we may have grown financially as a Nation on the sheeps back, and then wheat and cattle, we have done it at great cost to our wildlife. We are amongst the Worlds worst four countries for wildlife extinctions. Kangaroos will be the next victims of rural economic growth at any enviromental cost.