Transcription
Hi, I'm Derek Jenson. This is Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. My guest today is Rainy Oddveg. He's a consulting ecologist specializing in threatened species survey and management. Ten years ago, he became interested in what was going on with kangaroos after noticing a disparity in what we hear about plagues and what he was seeing during wildlife surveys. Generally, no kangaroos. On investigating the evidence, he was dismayed to find continental decline in large macropod populations, macropod relatives of kangaroos, and an obstinate refusal by the regulators to engage with the issues.
So, first off, thank you for your work in the world. And second, thank you for being on the program.
Thanks for having me, Derek. So, just, sorry to be so general, but tell us about kangaroos and who they are. What are macropods? And tell us about their, their, what they're like when, when things are going well. And tell us how they're doing right now.
Okay, so the kangaroo is a broad sort of term that's often applied to roughly 50 species of marsupials. So they're pouched mammals, typically an Australian group of mammals. There are a few opossums and other things in South America, but it's a group of mammals restricted mostly to Australia. And the macropods, being the large-footed, macropod being large-footed, group is part of that association of marsupial animals. There were quite diverse. We've already lost quite a few species in Australia before Europeans arrived. One of them was a, a wallaby, which was wiped out basically by hunting. But when the settlers arrived to Australia, though everywhere, they basically got off the boats in Sydney Harbour, and there were kangaroos in the forest. And of course, they started shooting them straight away because, you know, that's what you do when you're trying to settle into a country. But as the settlers moved out from that sort of beachhead of invasion, basically, there were reports of, it was like the plains of Africa. There were reports of literally thousands of kangaroos in mobs that would be half a mile across, a single mob. The forest would be swarming with them. So there, there is, there's all these accounts of the diversity and abundance of wildlife. And it wasn't just kangaroos, it was everything. There were flocks of black swans taking off in flight of hundreds that were deafening, and all those sorts of things. These days, if you see, you know, one or two black swans on the Swan River in Western Australia, it's a lucky day. So what Australia was, it was an Aboriginal people were living in harmony with those spaces, so literally thousands and thousands of years, up to 60, 80,000 years, that Aboriginal people lived with these animals. So the diversity and abundance of wildlife and macropods in Australia was phenomenal 200 years ago, 200 plus years ago. And since then, we've seen this process of human impact unfolding in all sorts of ways. Everybody would be aware of the fires burning at the moment, and that's obviously having an impact on everything, including the kangaroos in the areas that are affected. So, but before we talk more about what, what has happened in the last couple hundred years to kangaroos, can you talk about their, I hate talking about ecological function because animals exist for their own sake, but do they basically play the same sort of role as a buffalo on the Great Plains? Or, I mean, so they play the role of a large herbivore. And what a really good, yes. So they've been described as a keystone species. And that was a description used by somebody who was advocating with Davy Sharp in the area around Canberra. So they are the primary herbivore of our environment in Australia. And their nutrient cycle is, they do all sorts of things, including soil mixing. So where they have their camps, they dig scrapes, which disturbs the soil, mixes seeds, doesn't that sort of thing. They process nutrients. So they wander around doing their droppings, which is the cycle of fertilizing the landscape. When they die, they write, they provide at that point, you know, resources for all of the beetles and the decomposers and all of those sort of things. So when there were hundreds of millions of them that there used to be historically, they were an amazingly effective force for ecosystem function and probably one of the primary constituents of that. And just as an example of how that's changed, when the ACT people shoot them, they literally have to then bring in sheep and cows, and they bring in slashers and slash the grass, and then they do hazard reduction. So they light fires to reduce the biomass. When their specific purpose for shooting them, they say, was because they're reducing biomass. So their function is absolutely as grass grazers and nutrient cycles in the landscape. And I'm sorry for my almost complete ignorance of Australian ecology, but so in the United States, there are wolves who eat deer and buffalo. And so who would, who were the primary consumers of all of this? You mentioned the beetles, but were there also macro carnivores?
Yes, there were. And so they've, up until a few thousand years ago, there were marsupial lions. And I was seen on the mainland. When the dingoes arrived between four and six thousand years ago, the marsupial lions disappeared. And the most superior lions disappeared some time before that with a lot of the other megafauna. So the diprotodons and the giant kangaroos. And the general thinking is that those largest prehistoric kangaroos and diprotodons went into decline and disappeared as a consequence of climate change and a drying environment. And the kangaroos came through that. They're technically the last of the large megafauna. Once the dingoes arrived, they replaced those other predators. And then as Europeans brought foxes, they then became an additional predator. So the foxes have been found to take up to 50% of kangaroo joeys. So that's quite a regulating force on those species. And if you think about humans and what we do, we've got, you know, I don't know what it is anymore, but when I looked into it, there were four and a half million cars in New South Wales, and by quite a regulating effect on kangaroos. Yeah. So, but yes, in terms of natural processes, there were predators, and there still are predators of kangaroos.
So as someone who lives all the way across the world, I sometimes hear that there are just boatloads of kangaroos. And that I do hear, I do see stories in the press about how there are so many that they, and you alluded to this, that so many that they need to be killed. And let's not fight about the word "need" here because I think we're both disgusted by it. But, but what can you talk about kangaroo populations, perception versus reality?
Interesting thing, because I could walk out the door and I could say to somebody, kangaroos are in trouble, and they treat me like an idiot and say, there's some over there. And there are. There's a little group on the edge of Bathurst at a place called Boundary Road Reserve. There are more of them on Mount Panorama. But what people don't understand is that these are these isolated little relic populations that are surrounded by agriculture, the city of Bathurst, they're dissected by roads. And so what you end up having with kangaroo populations is they end up having these very isolated and fragmented populations that are often attached to the side of an urban center because you can't shoot at them when they're next to houses. So pretty well every town that you go to in Australia will have this little group living at the golf club or living on a common right next to the town. But once you get away from that environment, adding to the farming landscapes, you start to notice there are no kangaroos. So the extensive tracts of bush still have kangaroos. And when you look at the survey data from the surveys that the government does, and distribute the records spatially and look at where they're seeing them, you see that they're very closely tied to remnant vegetation, which time having family, and it's often mostly cleared, and often broad-scale clearing, and edges of towns. So the actual reality for the species is that they now have to persist in pockets with generally wide-open landscapes where there are no or almost no kangaroos.
And you mentioned earlier that this, the kangaroo is sort of an umbrella term for, I believe you said 50 species. So I presume that some of those species are doing better than others, and some are doing worse.
Yeah, I think the actual number might be 49. That's why I said about 50. But look, I don't know of any species that's doing well. So the scientific sort of community are very well aware that all of the smaller species are in big, big trouble. So the bettongs and those sort of things, really, because they're in a size class where things like foxes can predate more than just such. I've been a large number of the smaller macropods that have been taken out completely on the mainland. They persist on Tasmania, which is an island and doesn't have foxes. So all of the smaller size classes are in big, big trouble. The possible exceptions being a swamp wallaby. So the swamp wallaby is one of these species that hangs on until the bitter end. So they still persist in national parks, even right in Sydney. So Kuringai Chase National Park is somewhere that there are still naturally occurring populations of swamp wallaby. And they used to shoot them just down the road from the Australian Museum in Sydney, you know, in the 1830s. They were pretty well everywhere then. They have much more fragmented and reduced now, but they seem to be the species that's most able to cope with human development. They hide along creek lines. Even in Bathurst, like right through the center of town, you can still find kangaroos, not kangaroos, wallabies along the river and creeks right in town. But the ones that the big ones, so there's four main species that are of interest to me being the commercially shot species, because there's this dominant narrative that they're doing better than ever before, that we've made things better with farming and we put in dams and all of these other things. So the population has increased and there are more than they were when the European settlers arrived. That isn't true. If you look at the data, and if you look at the spatial distribution of the species, you can say that they've been removed from 1990 and maybe 97% of the places that they used to occur. So that's where my problem sort of comes in. The sense that the sign, most of the scientific community are of the view that they're doing fine, but they really refuse to engage with the issues that I've identified. So that's where I think that all species are in big trouble. You know, it's, it's human impact things. I don't see why we could suggest that the species that is most commercially valuable should not be the one that's affected by human impacts. I think that we really should be not ignoring the impact of commercial activities and human impact on therefore large metropolitan spaces. That's eastern and western grey kangaroos, the red kangaroos, and the wallaroos.
So, but before we go on, you've mentioned shooting kangaroos a lot. And is the, in the United States, there is among people who live in the country, there is a great hatred of wolves, and they kill wolves and coyotes because they hate them. That is as opposed to shooting deer, elk, because they like the white pot, the whitetail population of deer in the United States is doing fine, even though there's a lot of hunters because the, a white-tailed deer like edges and they like farmland. And so they've actually done well. There are other species of deer who have not done well. But the point is, is all the shooting, I guess the question I'm asking is, is there, is, is all the shooting of kangaroos, is that based on a hatred of kangaroos, much like there in the United States, or the hatred of wolves? Or is it on for other reasons?
It's a lot of reasons, and hatred is one of them. There is certainly that inherited attitude. So again, when Australia was first settled, there were a lot of kangaroos. And I've done a couple of calculations looking at landscapes and different environments, carrying capacities. And I've also looked at how much total grazing pressure is being exerted in Australia today. And when I look at that and convert those numbers into kangaroos, both of those figures came out to about a billion. So Australia can support, and possibly did support, about a billion kangaroos. And when the first settlers went out and started to establish their farms and stuff, these sort of numbers that they were reporting, and the numbers were quite ridiculous. Some farmers would shoot 60,000 kangaroos on a single property. That was a big problem for pastoralists. So they treated them like rats. They thought of them as vermin. They were listed as noxious species. They were called vermin, and they were exterminated. And that was the point of the program. There was a huge amount of hatred towards them. And not in the very first stages of settlement, they were sort of seen as, you know, the symbol of Australia, and they still are in some parts. But once the farming sector identified them as the main enemy to agricultural production in Australia, they poisoned them. They were brutal to them. The design of fences is actually something I look at as something that was probably designed in order to just have this or the impact on the population. Because they have fence, fences are generally mesh at the bottom and in a couple of strands at the top. So the mesh makes the kangaroos jump over. And if there's a tiny miscalculation and their foot goes between the strands at the top, they get twisted up in the wire and they hang there, and they take a day or two to die. And so there's all of these things that have happened. I've literally attended kangaroos that have fallen through cattle grids, and the person who called said, oh, the farmer said, you know, don't worry about it, it'll be dead in a few days. Their complacency towards the welfare of kangaroos is sometimes quite extreme and cruel. And so you get that. And when I spoke about this issue with somebody from the US, actually, a few years ago, and I said about this intergenerational hatred, the guys looked at each other and just said, just like wolves. They said, basically, there are still people in America who hate wolves, even though there are no wolves left. And so we see in Australia that sort of attitude that, you know, we've got a terrible drought at the moment, but if you look at the social media posts on people posting about kangaroos, they're literally saying, well, let's finish the job. They're looking at the drought is causing impacts on kangaroos, and they're just going out and killing whatever else is fine. And there's some sections of the community that design these things called cluster fences where they put around their properties, very tall fences that kangaroos can't get over, a fence in multiple properties, and then they just go through and shoot every single kangaroo that they could find because the grass is there for the sheep, cattle, it's not there for kangaroos, it's there to be amused by farmers. So you do get that. There's the sector that see them as a resource. So there are people who shoot them, some sell them, need skins, don't hate them, but they certainly don't respect them. And the way that they treat their joeys is again, it's cruel. They, you know, take them out and beat them to death. There's a lot of miss shooting that goes on. So that whole space is doesn't hate them. But then you've also got this third part that shoots for fun. So you do have hunters that go out and shoot, and they just will go out and, you know, they'll shoot 200 kangaroos in a night on a recreational permit just for fun. And they just have that complete disregard and probably to complete ignorance of what the situation is in terms of conservation. But they're certainly swayed by the dominant narrative that kangaroos are overabundant pests and should be shot. So there's a huge amount of complacency, there's a lot of hatred, and there are other people who just see it as a quick buck. Because if you can shoot, you know, a truckload of kangaroos in a night, you can make a thousand, a couple of thousand dollars a week doing that. So they're not thinking about it in terms of it being sustainable because most of these people don't even understand how slowly kangaroos breed. And that again, has been a dominant narrative that was established a long time ago, that populations explode. They don't. They have one joey a year, and 75% of their joeys die. So maximum population increase rates are only sort of 10 to 14%. And they crash during droughts, and shooting intensifies during drought. So, yeah, there's a lot of problems in in the way that kangaroos are perceived, and there's generally very low regard for them.
You said you said that they have about three-quarters of the joeys don't survive, and that they have one per year. How, at what age do the, the females become capable of having babies? And then how long is their, how long is their typical reproductive lifespan?
Okay, so they can potentially become pregnant with their first young is about two and a half years, but they generally don't have their first young until they're three and a half years old. And that joey is dependent, it's in the pouch, literally for 12 months, to 12 months depending on what species you're looking at. But then continues to suckle from the mother for another six months. So it's generally about 18 months of dependence. And whilst the joey is out of the pouch and suckling from the mother, she can replace it in the pouch. So she can have one in the pouch and one suckling and following her. But there's a 12-month spacing between that. So if you think about it, it's more like a conveyor belt where one joey pops off the conveyor belt every 12 months or so. So if she's having the first young at about the age of four, most of the does have stopped breeding by about 12. All of them have stopped breeding by about 15. So if you look at that, they're generally having about eight young a year, maybe 10 if they're lucky, if they've got good conditions. They stop breeding during drought. So if they're having eight to 10 joeys in their lifetime, and 75% of them are dying, again, half of them taken by predation, the other 25% is often they have accidents, they break their legs, they get separated from their mother, they have problems with poor nutrition. If it's drought, their mother's milk dries up, so they just die from malnutrition again. And so you're only looking at a female potentially producing two to three young to independence in her lifetime. And when you think that impact sex ratios are one-to-one, so there's an equal chance of having a male or a female joey, the average female kangaroo only is going to produce one female joey on average in her lifetime. So they only really replace themselves once. So when people talk about populations exploding and we need to shoot them, then this is all sustainable. Then you look at the rate of killing, and the fact that female kangaroos are very poor reproducers and only really replace themselves once every time you see someone shoot a female kangaroo, the population is going down, and it's also impacting on the species' capacity to even increase. It just can't.
And you mentioned earlier that there would be these huge mobs of kangaroos. What are, and I guess there are probably different species to species, but what are, what are the, the kangaroo social organizations?
Yes, they are different from species to species. So we'll talk about the grey kangaroos first, which are big mobbing, basically. They really like to be in a group of 150 or more animals. They will have large, like a really large dominant male with sub-alpha males in the group as well, that are sneaking around, sort of taking whatever opportunities they can get to take. It is very much dominated by the largest male, and then he has his harem of females. And it's an interesting thing because the females pass on their territory to their daughters. So again, one of those prevailing myths that kangaroos just roam across the landscape and, you know, they'll go hundreds of miles. That's not true. I've done radio tracking. The female Eastern Grey Kangaroo occupies a territory about one kilometer in an area. So that's not a big area at all. And the males, once they've established and matured, they might occupy, you know, four square kilometers. But the thing with the female and the mob structure is they will live there forever unless they get shot at, in which case they disperse. But the females' younger male offspring will disperse hundreds of kilometers. So that's how their genetic mixing goes on. Once the male gets to four or five or six years of age, he's becoming, they just have to bulk up at that age, and they become big. By the time this, or a ten or twelve years old, once they get to that age where they're starting to think about mating and stuff, they come into conflict within the group with their father, technically, or whichever male has replaced their father through that dominance hierarchy sort of process. But once they get there, that's it, basically. They go, I'm going to find somewhere better to live, and they just hop off across the landscape. So as somebody who, I'm also a wildlife rescue, most common animals that I'm dealing with, hit by cars and caught in fences and that sort of thing, are young males that are dispersing. So they just go. The females are occupying a safe territory where they're not being hunted or shot at. So that's why I mentioned earlier, the Boundary Road Reserve and now Panorama spaces around Bathurst, there are these stable female structures there. But some young males from those populations, when they decide, I've got to go, they're the ones that end up in town, in people's backyards and swimming pools, and run over. And so there's very much a fluid movement, but there is much more the young dispersing males then population generally just hopping merely about all over the place. Red kangaroos, similar, but I'm much more capacity to disperse. So their home range will often be up to 10 kilometers square, and they can follow storms during drought. But they still return to their home ranges after drought breaks. So, you know, they might end up 70 kilometers away following some peak. But once these general rain everywhere, they do go back. And these guys did some studies on them in the 1970s where they were catching them at water holes and putting radio collars on them and driving them 70 miles away and chucking red at the back of the car and seeing what they did. And the red kangaroos all harmed, even from 70 miles away. The only ones who didn't make it back were the ones that farmers shot or got caught in the corner of paddocks where the fences were too hard to get through. And they tended to still be in those paddocks at the corner that was closest to their home range. So they very much are range species that want to occupy and moving their familiar landscapes. And then the other ones I mentioned earlier that are subject to commercial killing are the wallaroos. And they have an even tinier home range. So again, people have done radio tracking studies on them. And the female, the females that they tracked were never more than 400 meters from where they were collared. The males are never more than 900 meters from where they were collared. So this is a species of occupies, they used to call them the hill kangaroo, and they live on more hilly country. And their group structure is very tiny. So a typical group of wallaroos will be consisting of the male with two or three females and young offspring, and including possibly young males. But by the time while their emails get to sort of two or three, they're already dispersing from those safe spaces into sort of hazardous environments, which is again where I tend to encounter them doing rescue work, always getting in trouble. So, yeah, so they are all very specifically different in their good dynamics. But yeah, they're the myths about them being these sort of nomadic species of just hopping across landscapes and over the hill into the sunset, just not true.
So you've talked about shooting a lot. I want to come back to that later. But can you talk about what are the primary threats? What have been historically and are currently the primary threats to kangaroos? Is it shooting? Is it habitat loss? Is it, but what are the threats?
So again, there was a study done. Look, everyone became concerned about kangaroos in the 1970s because the industry was just out of control, literally. There was no control. So they were just killing whatever they wanted to do. And a lot of skins were going to the US and other places, Europe. And the meat market wasn't such a big thing at the time because it's not particularly good to eat or hygienically obtained or anything like that. Don't worry about that at the moment. But okay, so 1970s, they said they're in trouble. And somebody did some studies in Tasmania, which as an island is a lot easier to look at. And kangaroos were just, as an immediate red flag species, and they said, one of the problems, habitat loss and hunting. And the guy who did the study said there were 96% of them were gone. So there was a huge conservation effort in Tasmania at the time. They considered that William National Park to conserve the species. They literally caught about 2,000 of them, putting bad traps at holes in fences. And they did introductions to about 18 sites around Tasmania. Mostly they died. They don't like being caught like that. They had quite good success. I think they had about 94% handling success. That when they relocated them to new locations, often they would be just too hostile in environment with roads or suburbs or shooters or whatever was still going on around them. I'm sorry, only seven of those reintroductions persisted. And it ran for, I think, about four or five years, they were doing this. But they stopped doing it because of opposition from the farming sector, which didn't want them being reintroduced to places. So even though they recognized that there are only four per scene, there was still this resistance to their conservation in Tasmania. And they have conserved them, and they are, they look like they have done a good job down there. They have restarted letting people shoot them in 1995, I think it was. And they're again ramping up the shooting. And I don't think that they've really looked at the numbers to make sure that they're doing a good job. But on the mainland, it's really interesting that they have completely ignored those findings. So Tazi was 100% unequivocal there. What are the impacts? Habitat loss and shooting. On the mainland, everyone says that same process hasn't happened. But when you look at what's happened, it obviously has happened. If you look at the broad, broad acre clearing sort of landscapes, there are no kangaroos there. And so it clearly does have an impact on the population. And wonderful CSIRO research, Michael Graham Arnold in the 1990s is doing a lot of work in Western Australia. And he looked at 462 remnant woodland patches through the sheep wheatbelt of Western Australia. And he said, patches less than two hectares are too small. Kangaroos have disappeared from those landscapes. They only have two hectare remnants left across them. He's very much linked their persistence to large remnant sections of vegetation. And so again, when your question is, what's the impact? Obviously, the clearing is the impact. The pest is linked to remnant vegetation. But then he said, the next most important factor for persistence was distance from humans. So again, the only logical conclusion we can draw from that is that the further they are away from humans, the less they're shot. So again, it seems pretty obvious that it's habitat loss and shooting that causes their decline and disappearance from range games.
And they're, they're so, talk more about the shooting. You've, you've mentioned a few times, how many, how many kangaroos are shot per year do you believe? And how many of those are under what different types of programs, whether it's farmers shooting them informally, whether it's government shooters shooting them, or whether it's people shooting them for, for harvest for leather or food?
So again, this is one of the fundamental problems. Nobody knows. We know that about three million a year were being shot in the early 2000s when the Russian meat market fired up. It was running from 2000 to 2009. By 2002, they were shooting about three million a year. I was part of the commercial harvest. But in terms of, and and that's declined. And they have, the industry and government like to say that they're not shooting any that many anymore because there's not the market for them. But they're the numbers shot commercially declined from peak kangaroo, was 2002. So the industry and the export to Russia didn't stop until 2009. And already by 2009, there were seven years of decline in take down to only about 20 to 25% of what they were shooting in 2002. So most harvest models around the world would look at that and say populations in decline. Nobody in Australia is willing to talk about that. Everyone just says, oh, it's market forces, you know, that's what determines how many killed. That's not true. If it's not true for any other species, it's also not true for kangaroos. I'm so I've done quite a bit of looking at harvest statistics, and the decline in the harvest statistics is at every temporal and spatial scale. So every kill box declines, every location declines. It doesn't matter if you're looking at from 1997 to 2001, or 2001 to 2005, or 2014 to 2018. Every single time period in the commercial harvest data shows decline in the take. So that's pretty comprehensively had failed anyone who says that, you know, they're not impacted by shooting. Then we get to the other two parts that you talked about, which farmers shooting. So that's just a really crazy one. When I first got interested in kangaroos in 2009, I contacted the department and said, you know, you can't say this is a sustainable industry if you don't know how many are being shot. We know how many are being shot commercially, but there are no figures anywhere on how many are shot by farmers. Can you please provide that data? And the department came back and said, oh, we don't collect that data. All of the shooting by farmers is managed locally. So you walk into your National Parks office in Bourke and say, I want to shoot 200 kangaroos, you get a tag over the counter. Nobody asks, did you shoot the 200 kangaroos? Nobody follows it up because it's too much effort for the farmers to report back. It's too much work for the manager to make a phone call and say, did you shoot the 200 kangaroos? And there was no central repository of that data. It was not fed through into a system. So when I asked that, the department said, oh, we're going to do it from now on. And so I ended up with data for 2011, I think it was, and then they stopped again. So, you know, there's no. And, and yeah, and they literally said to me that it's, it's too much work for the farmer to make a phone call and say, yes, I shot those 200 kangaroos, and it's too much work for the ranger to follow up and make a phone call and say, and chase up, did all those tags get used? On top of that, when I was doing some work on threatened plants in Western New South Wales, I picked up some resources from the Dubbo office of National Parks, and we went after the shed because it was, you know, there were boxes of books on and plants, and most of the shed was full of boxes of permits to kill kangaroos, farmer tag coming forms. And I just like, wow, this is a lot. He said, we empty this shed three or four times a year. And he said, we think that probably two or three kangaroos get shot for every tag we hand out. So the department knows that there's illegal shooting and thinks that there's legal shooting. They've never investigated or done anything about it. But they really have no idea about how many are being shot in terms of having a total or of how many are shot illegally through that process. And there is absolutely zero interest in illegal shooting that is completely not farmer related and not industry related. So in Australia, when I was a young bloke, everyone just, you know, what's going to do on the weekend? We're going to go shooting. And I just go out and shoot kangaroos for fun. Western Australia and Queensland both have recreational permits for the kangaroos. So you can go into your national parks and they'll give you a tag, either you can, don't shoot 50 kangaroos if you want to have fun this weekend. So really lightly regulated in those two states. But all of the other states, you know, if somebody wants to shoot a kangaroo in the bush, it's a victimless crime essentially. There's no one to see it, there's no one to report it, apart from the victim obviously being a kangaroo. And there's absolutely zero interest in prosecuting. I've literally referred local national parks rangers to eyewitness accounts of people shooting kangaroos in national parks, and national parks didn't do anything. Basically, they said, it's not CSI, you know, so they just don't worry about it. So, yeah, when, when we see the press coming out of Australia talking about it is the world's best managed sustainable harvest, basically, they don't know how many there were because nobody's looked at doing that modeling. Working on it at the moment, how many were there per European? I don't know how many were they. They don't know how many there are because their surveys are off load. They keep fiddling with correction factors and changing their survey methodologies. And they don't know how many being shot. So there's three very fundamental flaws in the management program that mean that when we hear about it, that sustainable industry, basically, as I thought, no exact, because they don't have any of the data to prove it.
So I'm putting together two of the numbers that you said. And one is, you said that you threw out the number 200, that a farmer could get a, a permit. It sounds pretty easily to get to kill 200 kangaroos. And then also earlier, you were saying that for some species of social kangaroo, they like being in groups of 150. So what that suggests to me is that when a, when that particular permit would be granted to kill 200, what you're talking about is the destruction of an entire community. You're not, that's not, that's not what a predator would do by eating one at the edge, whatever he wants, basically.
There's no checking. Rangers don't go out to a property and assess and determine whether there's been a valid sort of population estimate. And one of the other problems is because a kangaroo's probably territory might be one square kilometer or four square kilometers or 10 square kilometers, depending on what species you're looking at, they don't understand that there are boundaries involved. So two families might put in applications to shoot 200 kangaroos each. They might be the same kangaroos. So you know, there might be mothers in 150 or 200 kangaroos on a property that is occupying a landscape across a boundary. So both of those farmers are getting annoyed about the same thing. The reason both of them can easily get tags, and I've raised these issues with with rangers, and what's the process to get tags? And they said, we just hand them out. It's a PR exercise because there's a huge amount of animosity from the farming sector towards national parks because all the kangaroos are in the national parks and they come out and eat my crops. You get that attitude. So there's a lot of animosity. So the way the National Parks tries to, you know, offset that animosity is to be really friendly and accommodating. And in New South Wales, I don't know if it was no one 2020, this year, I think it was 2018, the Department of Agriculture effectively took over management of kangaroos. So National Parks are the people who hand out the tags, but the Department of Agriculture do all the research and they do the surveys. And it was the agriculture minister who announced the relaxing of all of the laws about shooting kangaroos in 2018 in New South Wales, so that farmers could then get their tags by making a bank or sending an email. No longer had to go into National Parks and fill in forms. They no longer had to fix tags to carcasses. So it's really the agricultural sector who sort of drive what goes on with kangaroo management in Australia. It's not a conservation sort of program in any way, shape or form. It's all bad, unfortunately.
Yeah. So we have about 10 minutes left. And before we go to a real wind-down question, are there major topics that you've wanted to cover that we haven't even started on? Like, you mentioned in passing, I'm sorry, go ahead.
No, no, I was just going to say that the surveys, seeing that if that was the thing that fascinated me right from the start, how they come up with these population estimates that they tell the world, you know, 54 million kangaroos or whatever they are saying the population is at the moment. That to me is just a whole fascinating space because I've gone and got the raw data from the departments. I've really broken down how they do their surveys because my core business is wildlife surveys. You know, if I'm surveying daisies and doing intensity population studies of daisies, it's absolutely no different to doing beetles or kangaroos or whatever else you're doing. The principles are the same. And so I've really drilled down and dissected how they come up with their population estimates of 54 million. And there's a really sneaky little bit that they're putting. So in the 1970s, when they started doing the surveys, because everyone was genuinely concerned about what was going on, they've really wanted to devise a system of survey that come up with population estimates of the continents so that they could make sure that this new industry that they would now be regulating, instead of it being unregulated prior to that, would be sustainable. So they had really good people working on it. They designed these surveys. They came up with these things called correction factors, which are completely valid if you're doing wildlife. So you cannot find a count every single animal in your study area. So they came up with 1.8 for red kangaroos, over working arid zones at the time. So they didn't come up with a figure for grey kangaroos at the time, but they came up with 1.8 for red kangaroos. And so they'd fly along in their planes and they'd come to the end and at times if I 1.8 and say, we think the population. Subsequently to that, they came up with popular correction factors for grey kangaroos, which are about, or they thought that because they occupied more wooded landscapes that they were harder to see and they were recording less of them. So they devised an alternative correction factor for them. But over the last 40 years, every now and then they revise their correction factors. So there's this fundamental concept in science, when you devise a constant, they call it that for a reason. You don't change it, it's a constant, you always use the same thing. So the precepts of science are replicate, repeat, you know, don't go changing your methodology, don't change your constants. That is all the surveys I've ever done, they constantly change their constants, they constantly change their survey methodologies. So they vary the strip width that they count. So when you're flying along in your helicopter or your airplane, you can count either side of the plane. And they have counted variously 100 meters to either side and 200 meters to either side. And they've come up with different correction factors for all of these sort of things. So they've used up to as a correction up to 23. It's the highest number that I've seen with over times in, you know, C1 times by 23, pop out million kangaroos or whatever. So really sneaky. I've raised these issues with the department. New South Wales has dumped correction factors in 2016. They've gone to a double count methodology, which is a better methodology. But so they still have detection probability within those models and equations. So they're still fudging the figures by having by applying different constants to their normal correction factors. But their vault. And as well as that, it not only proves that all of their pre-existing population estimates were wrong, because if they were doing valid surveys for 40 years, they wouldn't have changed them. When I said, hey, your surveys aren't valid, they would have said, yes, they are, and they would have kept doing them. So by dumping those methodologies, they're admitting that their methodologies were crap, basically. That's a technical term. But they also were doing this other thing. So the correction factors were a problem, and they were also flying over national parks and counting kangaroos in national parks and using those kangaroos to derive densities which are applied to farmland. So again, that's a big no-no. If you're, there's absolutely zero stratification of their data into different habitat types and different land uses. So, well, hey, why don't, why don't they, why don't they fly over a national park, count kangaroos, and then they can apply that same number to downtown Melbourne?
That's exactly right. And they do that. They do not subtract. Like, hey, and while you're doing an earful, I think you can do it over the harbor too. You can do it out in the ocean. Yeah, giving them flippers and a snorkel. So that's what I mean. That the Ballarat is a town of a hundred thousand people, and they apply the kangaroos recorded in national parks in Victoria to the area of Ballarat and cleared farmland. And when you look at their transaction, Victoria, there are over wheat fields, they return zero. So this is a 25 kilometer long transact where they see no kangaroos. They use the kangaroos from their 25 kilometer transact along the edge of some timber or in the national park or where they're doing these surveys, they apply them for the farmland. And they blow into the towns. They literally set in their 2017 survey report, one of their transactions over a town. And I plotted that data. There were no kangaroos in the town. They literally said in their report, we can, I have to move our transacts and make sure we don't sample urban areas anymore. But they do not subtract those urban areas when they do their area calculation, like they've been to the town's area. So this is how bonkers it is. So they literally saying there are 54 million kangaroos based on surveys that they've done in New South Wales, say 2018. They've done a wonderful little report where they said, we no longer fly over national parks. No, they were. So again, this is just this 100% validation that their survey methodologies were dodgy in the past. They've tried to fix them. And I'm working on their new data set. That's fascinating. But what it also is, is it's a very much 100% repudiation of all of the other states which still use correction factors and who still fly over national parks doing these surveys. So, you know, there's just. And that's the other thing. I've spoken with other ecologists, international ecologists about all of this sort of stuff, and they're shocked that even survey methodologies haven't been standardized and every state isn't doing the same thing. You know, some of them are using helicopters, I'm using fixed-wing surveys, some are doing 200 meter transects, some are doing 100 meter transects. You know, even New South Wales has fixed-wing and helicopters and 100 meter and 200 meter and double count. And all these other things are just, you know, this is not science. It is, you know, signs. So anyone overseas who is listening to this and then reads a report that says, you know, about kangaroo plagues and rigorous and scientific, you know, I just shake my head. And the funny thing about what's not funny, it's incredibly sad. I've raised all this with the department, and I am just totally blacklisted. They just hate me. They refuse to read issue my license to be a practicing ecologist years ago. I literally had to take the department to court just to get my license back to do the wildlife survey work that I do. And the CEO of National Parks described me as the worst consultant in New South Wales. And just like, wow, a bit of a laugh in the face. All I've ever done is, you know, work on these sort of issues. That important species conservation is important to me. I love my things. Reptiles, I'm not even that into them. I wasn't into computers. I am now, obviously. But yeah, look, it's just, it's a big shame that when you, it's very much shooting the messenger. There are serious problems. They've acknowledged those problems by dumping their survey methodologies. But they still treating me like.
I'm some sort of criminal instead of somebody who actually has, you know, real competencies in certain spaces in wildlife management. So just get on with it.
So we have like, excuse me, one or two minutes left. And what, what do you want people to do with this information? And how can they support you? And more importantly, how can they support the kangaroos?
Look, that's a hard question to answer, Derek. Nothing apart from the extinction of kangaroos is going to stop farmers shooting kangaroos. I do like, there are health issues with eating the meat. So it really hurts everyone. Don't even the researcher properly. They're not tested for things like toxoplasmosis. They can't produce a clean product. Or Russia would still be importing it. So, you know, don't use kangaroo products.
There was a film made a couple of years ago that's doing a very big push internationally to impact on the markets for skins as well as meat products. I think that's all very valid. But I think that the Australian government, retinas are really clear, clearly here as they've heard in the past, that the world actually does care about kangaroos. And this fast that we're putting out to the world that we're, you know, we're white people and we wear suits and we're really kind and we care about in our environment is all basically not true. We're in charge of the most scandalous wildlife swindle on earth. It's worse than what the Russians were doing to the whales. This is millions of animals a year being killed under a program which is just fast. And I think the Australian government needs to heal out and clear that the world is watching and we need to pull our socks up.
You know, we've got these fires now raging. I always looked at the east coast of Australia as a sanctuary because the commercial harvest isn't there. Yes, there are cities and towns on the way down the coast, but there are spaces in between with all the national parks that still have kangaroo populations in them. That's all burning. So I was literally looking at the last little strip of eastern Australia as a stronghold for the species because it's basically shot everywhere else in New South Wales. And now it's on fire. And yet they are continuing to shoot them more and more.
The farmers are literally screaming blue murder at the moment in Queensland because the department has detected that there's a problem up there. So they've stopped commercial harvesting in some of the Queensland harvest zone. And the communities are just saying, you're destroying our communities, you're destroying our livelihood. The kangaroo, they, you don't know what you're talking about. They're plagues. And so there's just this huge animosity towards a species that I think the rest of the world needs to say, hey guys, like now, you know, then when they donate as much as five sheep. All that they sort of lies that are told about kangaroos to demonize them, to give social license for their nests, Florida, and really they need to be challenged. And and the Australian government and the Australian generally need to be told that, you know, the rest of the world is watching and the rest of the world actually cares.
So I do think that international pressure on Australia to to look at this issues and take it seriously will be effective. But every time it's happened in the past, the backlash from the rural sector has been quite extreme. There was a lady who wrote some stuff in the 1960s and the Australian farming sector just went nuts. There are literally people saying, if we can't shoot them, we're going to poison them. So there's this complete Panama City that somehow needs to be broken. And I do think that science can do that. Nobody's really explained to the farmers their low impact, their slow breeding. You know, the farmers have been allowed to live under these sort of mists apprehensions that kangaroos are terrible for the environment and that they breed quickly. 200 years nobody has ever explained to them that those things are just not true. And I think that if farmers understood that, that maybe they would like not and say, okay, well, you know, having 20 kangaroos in the backpack isn't such a big deal. I'll leave them alone.
But yeah, we really need to have a lot of probably counselling and psychotherapy to get Australians off their case because the poor kangaroos are copying it every way. Well, thank you so much for your work and thank you for being on the program. And I would like to thank listeners for listening. My guest today has been Reinme on Fish. This is Derek Jensen for Resistance Radio, the Progressive Radio Network. You.