Be green, eat more ’roos

The Courier Mail online, 28 May 2008

It’s taken a Pom to tell us what we should have figured out 100 years ago. Kangaroo meat is terrific tucker and eating it could reduce rural Australia’s dependence on sheep, which are destructive to the environment and helping to wipe out our amazing marsupials.
Christopher Dickman, a butcher’s son from London, believes the slaughter of millions of kangaroos a year - many left to rot on the ground - is an obscene waste and an environmental tragedy. And he is right.
Those of us born in the bush have seen countless ’roos destroyed because they compete with sheep and cattle for fodder.
Dickman, 52, a professor in ecology at the University of Sydney’s school of biological sciences, is also the director of the Institute of Wildlife Research and an advocate of “fauna farming”. He would like us to farm kangaroos and get rid of sheep altogether. The idea is not as crazy as it sounds.
“Many of the kangaroos that are shot end up not being used at all and the carcasses lie on the ground and then provide food for feral pigs, foxes and feral cats,” Dickman said.
The burgeoning populations of feral species put further pressure on our glorious native animals, he says.
He points out that 28 species and sub-species of mammals have become extinct since white settlement. And 17 of those were marsupials. He regrets that most Australians remain oblivious to the threat to the remaining marsupials. From day one they were regarded as hideously ugly and were systematically destroyed, he said.
By the 1870s in Queensland the Marsupials Destruction Act invited a war against the hapless creatures, which competed with sheep for grass. To encourage the slaughter there were strict penalties for landholders who did not kill marsupials on sight.
Dickman was speaking via satellite phone from deep into the Simpson Desert west of Bedourie in Queensland where he is on a field excursion with his students. He is a passionate advocate of eating ’roo meat to help save marsupials.
In bumper years in Australia up to 6 million ’roos are slaughtered for meat and skins in a $300 million national cull which provides at least 4000 jobs.
Latest government figures show there are 1860 licensed macropod shooters in Queensland who can harvest red kangaroos, eastern grey kangaroos and wallaroos. Because of drought the total kill in Queensland last year was “only” 1,801,522.
Kill quotas are set each year by the Environmental Protection Agency after aerial surveys of macropod numbers. Most of the meat is turned into pet food or is exported.
Tim Mulherin, the minister for the Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries says the main export market for ’roo meat is Russia. He said the kangaroo industry in Queensland is estimated to be worth more than $120 million a year and provides employment for about 2400 people.
It’s a mystery to me why Australians have failed to embrace ’roo meat. It is low in fat and high in protein and in the right hands ’roo is a succulent dish to rival beef or lamb. It could be to Australia what venison is to Europe.
The professor’s wife, Mrs Carol Dickman, said her husband walks the talk. “We eat a lot of kangaroo,” she told me.
“We don’t have lamb in the house; I’m not allowed to buy sheep. Chris feels they do far too much damage ecologically.”
She often marinates her ’roo meat in teriyaki sauce.
“It has a more gamier flavour than steak without the fat content.” she said.
Professor Dickman said because ’roos have padded feet they are not as destructive as sheep and cattle which cause erosion.
Perhaps we can blame the Brits for the environmental calamity that came with the sheep industry. Clearing of land for sheep may have provided much wool for England, but it also caused the destruction of native animal habitats on a grand scale. It took 200 million years for Australia’s marsupials to evolve and only 200 years for white fellas to deal many of the creatures a fatal blow.
“The way the land has been damaged is a national tragedy,” Dickman said.
Dickman remains fascinated by threatened creatures such as the spotted-tailed quoll, the rat-like brown antechinus, the bilby, desert bandicoots, gliders, dunnarts, rat kangaroos and bridled nail-tail wallabies.
He plays Beethoven piano concertos while he combs the sand for his beloved rodents. He wrote a book outlining the vulnerability of marsupials. A Fragile Balance: The extraordinary story of Australian marsupials (Craftsman House) has been a bestseller. And he took his campaign to save wildlife to Britain recently.
One paper featured a picture of a rather unattractive wombat with a headline: “Hairy-nosed wombats need love too, scientist tells Australians.”