#NotShoes: U.S. animal rights activists are trying to halt Australians from killing kangaroos
If the U.S. Kangaroo Protection Act passes, both leather and meat, which often finds its way to pet food, would no longer be allowed. It would cut off a large portion of Australia’s global exports.
DAMIAN CAVE: Ian White drove slowly over the red dirt track, past wheat stubble and into the long grass, where he glimpsed a tuft of white fur moving near the woods to his left… “See, that’s a doe,” he said. “I don’t especially want to shoot a doe.”
A doe usually has a joey in her pouch. He and others who hunt kangaroos bear this in mind, Mr. White said, despite claims to the contrary by American activists who are trying to shut down their livelihood, calling it inhumane.
These critics, he said, just don’t understand how life actually works here in the middle of Australia. Kangaroos have been hunted on the continent for thousands of years, “and there are still more of them than people,” Mr. White said…
He insisted that Australia’s commercial kangaroo industry isn’t like a John Wayne western with guns blazing. It’s a regulated business that works with the government. Hunters must pass a sharpshooting course to ensure a humane kill, and kangaroo numbers are closely monitored by state and federal officials, who set quotas to ensure sustainable populations. Most important, said Mr. White, 58, a third-generation full-time shooter who goes by “Whitey,” kangaroos produce healthy meat, strong leather and the jobs that keep small towns whole…
Around the same time that Mr. White started shooting kangaroos, activists in the United States began fighting to protect them… In 1971, California banned the import of kangaroo parts. Three years later, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service did the same for three commercially shot kangaroo species — all based on concerns about declining kangaroo populations, concerns that many Australians did not share…
Kangaroos were removed from the U.S. list of endangered and threatened wildlife in 1995, and the California law lingered without much notice until the mid-2000s, when a vegetarian activist group sued Adidas for selling soccer shoes that used imported kangaroo skins… Now, the campaign is being revived through a collaboration between international activist groups, a California member of the U.S. House of Representatives and an Australian politician who is an elected representative of the Animal Justice Party.
Their goal is to persuade companies, consumers and lawmakers to boycott or ban anything that comes from what is often described as the largest commercial animal kill in the world. They argue that especially after the fires that tore through Australia last year, possibly killing several million kangaroos, the commercial industry must be shut down.
“What we realized after the fires was that we don’t know how many of the animals survived,” said Mark Pearson, who was executive director of the group Animal Liberation in Australia before entering the New South Wales Parliament in 2015. “If we don’t know how many are there, there shouldn’t be anyone out there shooting them.”
Mr. Pearson said the current effort had gained momentum much as the ones before did, through a push from the United States… Mr. Pearson said he had welcomed a call a few months ago from Wayne Pacelle, a prominent animal rights activist in Bethesda, Md., who asked him for relevant research… That connection eventually led to an international campaign, “Kangaroos Are Not Shoes,” that includes an online video, a website and lobbying efforts around the world.
Mr. Pacelle said that he had taken a bill that would ban kangaroo imports to Representative Salud Carbajal, a California Democrat, whom he described as one of several animal-friendly lawmakers. If the bill, known as the Kangaroo Protection Act, passes, both leather and meat — which often finds its way to pet food — would no longer be allowed.
It would cut off a large portion of Australia’s global exports, estimated to be worth $60 million annually, and other countries could follow suit, shrinking the industry or forcing it to fold… “We think this would reduce the overall kill,” said Mr. Pacelle, president of the Center for a Humane Economy…
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals [PETA], considered by many to be the highest-profile animal rights group in America, praised the “Kangaroos Are Not Shoes” campaign. “Any move to stop kangaroos from being shot, their joeys from being pulled from their dead mothers’ pouches, and their heads from being bashed in — which is what kangaroo killers do — is a good one,” it said in a statement…
In the end, the argument over Australia’s kangaroo industry has always been only partly about cruelty and only partly about animals. It is most viscerally about whose values rule.
To Mr. Pacelle, Australia’s professional hunters are justifying harm to wildlife to get paid. To George Wilson, a professor at the Australian National University who has spent 50 years in wildlife management,… animal rights activists are engaging in “imperialism” that forces their sensitivities onto others…
Leslie Mickelbourgh, the managing director of Warroo Game Meats, said… The animals are increasingly seen as a more ethical alternative to beef and lamb because kangaroos do not contribute to climate change by belching out methane, and because they are harvested in their habitat. The industry’s critics, Mr. Mickelbourgh said, “don’t understand our country.” SOURCE…
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