This might explain it

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By Dwain Duxson.

This might explain it - This might be the last piece on our stories about a pest called the Kangaroo. We might at some point publish all the replies because they were bloody interesting, and it alerted me as to how wide the issue is across the country. Here is one of the replies, and it may explain why the explosion in population has occurred.

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"Dear Dwain. About 57 years ago, my first boyhood income came from shooting and skinning Roos in far NW Queensland on a 286,000-acre Cattle station. We had a serious contingent of Gatton Ag College vets on the station at the time, working on Brucellosis detection and eradication. The vets told me that the problem with Roos is that they conceive at least once a month but use post-natal abortion to prevent the crawling foetus from reaching the pouch if:

- They already had a joey.

- The season was bad.

- There were too many in the herd.

So:

- Culling them just accelerated reproduction. 

- Adding permanent watering points and clearing for pasture improvement just accelerated reproduction.

- Cultivating Roo-edible Crops just accelerated reproduction.

The only way to bring numbers down is to restrict access to water, and then only if the water is human-provided, which is hard down South. You can teach Cows and Horses to push a simple barrier away from a water trough with their snouts, Roos won't. Roos also hate Dogs, while Cows, Sheep and Horses tolerate them. I had collected over 1,000 Roo skins over about a year, with no visible impact on numbers next year. Reply to dwaind@farmtender.com.au

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