PETER SINGER: ‘Every year, millions of kangaroos are shot, in the largest commercial slaughter of terrestrial wildlife anywhere in the world. No one really knows how many are killed. Australia’s state governments issue quotas, which in recent years have allowed for the killing of more than five million kangaroos, but the quotas are not a reliable indication of the number actually shot…
There are two main reasons why so many kangaroos are killed. First, there is money to be made from the sale of their meat, skin and fur. Kangaroos were hunted and eaten by Aborigines, but among urban Australians, the meat is not popular… The other major reason for killing kangaroos is that farmers regard them as a pest, eating grass that the farmers want to use to feed more profitable cattle and sheep…
There is, however, a deeper ethical question about the large-scale slaughter of kangaroos. Should we be giving precedence to sheep and cattle, and the money they earn for the community, over native animals who have little commercial value, but are not environmentally damaging in the way that cattle and sheep are in Australia’s arid interior?… We do not have to shoot an animal to bring about his or her death. We can do it just as cruelly when we take over, for our own purposes, the land that wild animals use…
We rightly oppose the invasion of one country’s territory by another. In The Outermost House, the American naturalist Henry Beston wrote, of non-human animals, “They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.” We should take seriously the idea that taking land from wild animals is like invading another country, even if its inhabitants are of a different species’. SOURCE…
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