Australia's beloved kangaroos are now controversial pests
A mother kangaroo and her joey hop across Main Street to graze on a scruff of grass growing near a gas pump.
It’s a cool spring evening in White Cliffs, a quirky opal-mining town in New South Wales. Locals live like hobbits here, in ventilated holes. Thousands of mine shafts pock the parched earth. But the two eastern gray kangaroos are the oddest sight around.
“I’ve never seen them in town like this,” says George Wilson, a professorial ecologist who’s been studying kangaroos for five decades. “I wonder if they’re someone’s pets.”
Tourists point and gawk. Children ooh and aah. When the sun begins to set, the “roos”—Aussie shorthand for the hopping animals—head out of town. A while later, a young man finishes his beer in the local saloon. He pays his bill, climbs into a white truck with hooks on the back, and drives off. His job that night: to kill as many kangaroos as he can.
Australia has a complicated relationship with its national symbol. Kangaroos are among the world’s most iconic, charismatic species—the living, bounding emblems of the country’s unique biodiversity. At once sublime and adorably absurd, they are evolutionary marvels—the only large animal that hops.
And Australians are demonstrably proud of them. Kangaroos star in movies and TV shows, poems and children’s books. Their images adorn the country’s currency, coat of arms, commercial airlines, naval vessels, Olympic insignia, and athletic uniforms.
To outsiders, the big-footed, fat-tailed, perky-eared creatures are a stand-in for the country itself: Australia means roos, and roos mean Australia. There may be no animal and nation in the world more closely identified.
But there are more than twice as many kangaroos as people in Australia, according to official government figures, and many Aussies consider them pests. Landholding farmers, called graziers, say that the country’s estimated 50 million kangaroos damage their crops and compete with livestock for scarce resources.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2019/02/australia-kangaroo-beloved-symbol-becomes-pest/?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=crm-email::src=ngp::cmp=editorial::add=NGME_20190202::rid=594148660