KANGAROO PLAGUE IN N.S.W.

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27415, 30 July 1954, Page 6

KANGAROO PLAGUE IN N.S.W.

Heavy Damage Caused In Wheat Belt EFFECT OF DROUGHT DURING WINTER (From the Australian Correspondent ol “The Press”) SYDNEY, July 28 Australians are proud of thei: national animal, the kangaroo, but jus now, out in western New South Wales it is regarded as a scourge. Kangaroo: are doing hundreds of thousands o pounds worth of damage to wheat crops already feeling the effects of a long dry winter, but because they are protected, farmers cannot shoot them without a permit. The permits are granted by the Chief Secretary’s Department, in Sydney, after the applicant farmer has applied either to the Pastures Protection Board or the police. Either a board official or a police officer inspects the property for evidence of the damage done by the kangaroos and forwards a report to the Chief Secretary’s Department which in due course forwards permission or refusal. If he gets a permit the farmer is told to go ahead and shoot a specified number of kangaroos on his property. The permit often takes three weeks to reach the farmer, who, in the meantime, must stand by while the kangaroos eat acres of young wheat down to the roots. Even then the number specified in the permit is invariably cut drastically. One farmer who applied for permission to destroy 100 kangaroos was granted a licence to kill only 12. The survivors continued to eat his wheat and also the dry grass on which his sheep grazed. The district worst affected by the kangaroo plague is in the middle-west of the State’s wheatlands and mixed farms. The kangaroos have travelled in large mobs from the far west and the desert country beyond, where drought has laid the whole land bare of grass and dried up the rivers and waterholes. Usually content to keep well away from settled areas, the kangaroos, driven by hunger and thirst, have penetrated into the richer pasturelands to the east. They batter down stout fences, which they cannot leap, either by frequent mass charges, or by seeking a rabbit hole, forcing their heads and forequarters through, then heaving the fence out of the ground. It is not uncommon to find mobs of from 80 to xOO kangaroos on a small property of 1000 acres, but even when permission is granted to destroy them they are not easily trapped. In the daytime they seek the seclusion of a wood and it takes about 20 beaters and a dozen men with shotguns to clear an area of about two miles by one mile. Even so the kangaroos show cunning and because of their speed through timber they prove a difficult target. One party recently making a drive in bush where an estimated 80 kangaroos were hiding, succeeded, in two beats, in accounting for only Apart from an open season being declared, only timely rains seem a solution to the problem for the farmers, so that the kangaroo mobs may return to their own dreary, but peaceful pasture lands.