Native Australian Animals
This page provides links to articles, papers and other items relating to Australian native animals. Much of the material published on this website will relate to kangaroos.
Issues
Because of its long geographical isolation from the rest of the world, Australia enjoys megabiodiversity ie hundreds of times more native animals than most countries on Earth.
It also has the fifth highest extinction rate for native animals of any country in the world.
This very high extinction rate is the result of an unremitting assault on two fronts: firstly from land clearing (mainly for pasture for sheep and cattle), and secondly from hunting, for meat and skins, for ‘pest’ control (mainly by the sheep and cattle farmers), and for fun. For many decades state governments actually paid bounties to people to slaughter kangaroos, thylacine and other native animals.
Many native animals that survived the initial pogrom of the first two hundred years remain threatened and are likely to become extinct in the near future mainly because of unbridled ongoing land-clearing.
As of November 2016, the NSW government has pulled out all stops on the killing of native animals, removing restrictions on land clearing and permitting the wholesale massacre of (allegedly) non-threatened native species for fun, under its Orwellian Biodiversity Conservation Act.
Kangaroos, once the most ubiquitous and prolific keystone species of all Australian ecosystems, are one of the most beleaguered of all Australian native species. All kangaroos, but none more than the Eastern Grey Kangaroo, still suffer assault from both fronts.
Their preferred habitat continues to disappear while they continue to be killed in their millions for meat and skins, and in millions more by land ‘managers’.
In the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), for the last seven years, thousands of kangaroos every year have been killed by government officials.
Eastern Grey Kangaroos are now believed to be extinct across much of their range. But no sphere of Australian government is prepared to offend the farmers by acknowledging that this species is now in dire peril, and putting it on their threatened species list.
Because APA had its origins fighting the ACT kangaroo massacre, many of the items published under this page will be about kangaroos.
New South Wales_(NSW) Native Animal and Vegetation Legislation_June 2017 – APA Submission
