Victorian farmers call for more action to be taken against kangaroos

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VICTORIA: Victorian farmers have called for kangaroos to be culled in much greater numbers because of the hazards they pose to motorists, as well as the damage they are inflicting on pastures, crops, fences and earnings.
On Victorian roads a kangaroo was involved in a fatal crash at Glenalbyn in September, when a motorist swerved to avoid it. The vehicle ran off the road and hit a tree, killing a male passenger.
Kangaroos have also been involved in repeated non-fatal crashes on Victorian country roads, some of them roll-overs, and are generating a substantial amount of work for country Victorian panel shops. Often in these cases a vehicle leaves the road and collides with a tree or another fixed object. Sometimes, the swerving vehicles have collided with other cars.
After the fatal crash at Glenalbyn a senior Victorian police officer said swerving to avoid a kangaroo could be “an absolutely fatal mistake”.
Senior Sergeant Mark Edwards, the officer in charge of the Bendigo highway patrol, told The Sunday Age that a lot of the crashes in the area covered by his team have directly involved kangaroos.
There had been at least two fatal crashes this year which occurred after a motorist swerved to avoid a kangaroo, he said. “And then we’ve had an incredible amount of serious and other injury collisions that have also occurred as a direct result of kangaroos. And generally people swerving to miss them,” he said.
“Collisions with kangaroos, they are certainly higher than I’ve ever seen before,” he said.
“Rather than hitting the kangaroos, drivers have this tendency, and I suppose it’s a natural reaction to swerve to miss them. But of course some of our roads that we have in this area, once you get off the road and onto a gravel shoulder, they’re very unforgiving roads. You have trees very close to the edge of the road, so there’s not a lot of room for error,” he said.
He urged drivers to be vigilant. He said they could reduce their risk of meeting kangaroos by not driving on quieter secondary roads around sunrise or in the evening and at dusk, and by slowing down (which gave them more time to react).
Don’t swerve for kangaroos
If a kangaroo jumped in front of a car, Senior Sergeant Edwards said the safest thing to do was for the motorist to continue driving on their intended path without braking – and not swerve. If a driver braked, the best approach was to drive straight while braking – and not swerve.
Meanwhile, farmers in central Victoria have told The Sunday Age that in some cases kangaroos are costing them thousands of dollars a year in lost revenue, because they are grazing pastures so much that they have to run less livestock.
One farmer said he regularly saw kangaroos in large numbers on his property. “This year is the worst in my experience,” said the farmer, who did not wish to be named.
The experienced farmer said he was running about 10 per cent less sheep than he would otherwise be able to. This translated to about a 10 per cent reduction in profit, in a year when earnings were already affected by the severe dry conditions, he said.
Asked how frustrated he was by the kangaroo situation, he said: “It hits your hip pocket when you’re already struggling financially. And when you go out in the mornings and you see 50 or 100 roos that could be your sheep, and the government isn’t paying us an agistment for them – it doesn’t sit well.”
In his paddocks that bordered public bushland, it was “quite easy” to see mobs of 50 kangaroos, “and there could be five different lots,” he said.
“We had an oat crop in this year, it was within a kilometre of the forest, and it regularly had hundreds in it,” he said.
Peter Tuohey, president of the Victorian Farmers Federation, said more action needed to be taken to deal with kangaroos. He said the current permit system which allowed farmers to kill some kangaroos did not go far enough.
“It should be easier to obtain permits to cull more kangaroos, to keep them at a more sustainable level,” he said.
Mr Tuohey said kangaroos were particularly affecting farms that were near public bushland. “They certainly come out in large numbers and graze crops and pastures, and that’s where the significant damage is done. They also do quite a bit of damage to mature crops, because they get in there and they just knock it down,” he said.