For the first time since the kangaroo industry began operating over 50 years ago, a damning government study has exposed inherent and widespread cruelty within the kangaroo meat and skins industry. The government research report titled “Improving the humaneness of commercial kangaroo harvesting” was commissioned by the Rural Industries Research Development Corporation and published in 2014, 30 years after the RSPCA first discovered systemic widespread cruelty to joeys within the kangaroo industry.

This compelling report revealed that professional shooters for the kangaroo meat and skins industry are routinely killing joeys using practices that breach their industry code of practice. This damning report exposed that professional shooters are abandoning 99% of dependent at-foot joeys that become orphaned after they kill their mother, leaving hundreds of thousands of baby kangaroos to die alone every year from starvation, stress and predation. During the field study, government researchers also observed shooters swinging pouch joeys by their hind legs while bashing them with an iron bar, bashing them against utility racks, stomping on their heads, and decapitating them without stunning, with shooters rarely checking if the joey was dead before walking away with their mother. These practices are all in breach of their Code of Practice for the Humane Shooting of Kangaroos and Wallabies and have the potential the cause severe and prolonged pain and suffering for the joeys.

However after its publication, the Australian government immediately shelved this controversial report, have never referred to it and appear to be deliberately keeping its findings a secret from the public, while continuing to promote the kangaroo meat and skins industry as ethical and humane, and ignoring their own scientist’s recommendations in the report that ‘Not telling the public about the welfare impacts of commercial kangaroo harvesting should no longer be an option’.

Legal advice provided to the Australian Society for Kangaroos by Dr Malcolm Caulfield from the Animal Law Institute, describes how this government report reveals “systemic non-compliance of national codes of practice and the real possibility of serious and routine breaches of laws governing the kangaroo meat and skins trade”. Our advice from Dr Caulfield highlights that the kangaroo meat and skins industry and all involved including landholders and professional shooters are potentially in breach of their licenses, as well as state and federal wildlife protection laws.

State government data published in the NSW Commercial Kangaroo Harvest Management Plan Annual Report revealed that in NSW alone, hundreds of thousands of female kangaroos are being slaughtered by the kangaroo meat and skins industry every year, leaving hundreds of thousands of joeys to die a cruel death every year across Australia.

In light of these findings, and the fact that the systemic cruelty and neglect of orphaned joeys by the industry was identified nearly 40 years ago by the RSPCA, it is well and truly time the RSPCA made a stand to protect orphaned joeys and initiated an independent inquiry into the validity and legality of this barbaric and unnecessary industry.

You can view this controversial report at the link below:
https://www.agrifutures.com.au/wp-content/uploads/publications/13-116.pdf