Do People Care About the Other Crisis Killing Koalas & Kangaroos?

Photo: Saeed Khan/AFP Getty Images

Source Free From Harm
By Ashley Capps

As Australia’s unprecedented bushfires continue to rage, heartbreaking images of scorched koalas and charred kangaroos have devastated viewers around the globe. An estimated 1 billion or more animals have died in the fires, but it’s the pitiful photos of flame-chewed koalas being carried from the blaze like bewildered, beat-up babies that have perhaps most captured our collective sympathy and despair; along with the images of beleaguered kangaroos, their normally genial silhouettes frozen in panic against a backdrop of roaring orange.

It is unbearable to witness.

Thankfully, these same images have also inspired millions of people to donate to rescue groups on the ground retrieving animals from the fires and tending to their injuries. But as the surge of combined sorrow and sympathy for these iconic animals swells around the world, I find myself wondering: What about the other crisis that is killing Australia’s koalas and kangaroos, and in even greater numbers?

The World Wildlife Fund reports an estimated 45 million animals are killed each year in the Australian state of Queensland alone just from bulldozing of their habitat, a crisis they note is “driven primarily by the livestock industry.” In just 4 years, between 2012 and 2016, bulldozing of trees killed at least 5,183 koalas in the state. Queensland RSPCA’s Mark Townend notes, “The mass suffering, injury and needless deaths of wild animals caused by the bulldozing of their forest homes is largely hidden but it is Queensland’s greatest animal welfare crisis.”

Queensland had the largest koala population on the continent in 1990, with an estimated 295,000; but in just 20 years that number decreased by more than 40%, while on the Koala Coast, 80% of these animals have been lost. Thousands of koalas continue to be killed each year as more forests are cleared for cattle grazing in response to consumer demand for beef. But it’s not just Queensland. In Australia as a whole, “beef cattle production is the major driver of tree-clearing.”

Millions of Kangaroos Killed for Burgers & Beef

The same industry is also terrorizing and destroying kangaroos en masse. Since the year 2000, an average of more than two million kangaroos per year have been shot by commercial shooters for the meat industry.

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this tragic loss of life is harder to deny
when the staggering numbers
are posted daily before
our eyes.

Karen Lyons Kalmenson