There is no doubt that the firearms and shooting industries are getting hit from all angles as out of touch antis seek to chip away at anything they can falsely represent of scaremonger the public into believing.
South Australian Liberal MP Rowan Ramsey has spoken out and said animal welfare activists had successfully reduced the demand for kangaroo products.
“There was a documentary put out called Kangaroo: A Love Story, it is called a documentary, and it actually alleges that the western and eastern grey and the red kangaroo in Australia are threatened species, which is absurd,” Mr Ramsey said.
“There are 45 million of them, far more than would have been here at time of white settlement.”
The ABC reported Australia processed just 15 per cent of the kangaroos available for commercial harvest last year.
Fewer than 1.5 million kangaroos were harvested from a sustainable quota of 7,174,072 across NSW, Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia in 2017, according to the Department of Environment and Energy.
The Kangaroo Industry Association President Ray Borda said the industry had not kept up with the quota, which has been increasing.
“You just can’t turn on shooters and you just can’t turn on infrastructure that quick, but also the damage that the opponents of the industry do, and we’re trying to upgrade the value of the industry,” Mr Borda said.
Mr Borda said margins in the kangaroo meat and leather industry were currently “very thin” because of the drought conditions in Australia.
“They’ll move around to look for feed and water, which means our guys have to travel further and it becomes economically expensive … [but] there is actually a growing market,” he said.
But Mr Ramsey said the film had “destroyed the markets to the point where Adidas and Nike are winding back” use of kangaroo leather.
“They’re phasing that production out on the back of these protests, which are on the back of misinformation,” Mr Ramsey said.
“I think we need to find a way for this industry to succeed, so that kangaroo shooters, processors, whatever you want to call them, can actually make a living and actually take the numbers the environmental department tells us are sustainable.”
“People won’t go out and harvest kangaroos if they can’t make money from it.”
Responding to Mr Ramsey’s comments co-director of Kangaroo: A Love-Hate Story Mick McIntyre said Australians should question whether kangaroos needed be killed.
But Mr McIntyre said “natural selection” should balance the kangaroo population in a drought.
“There is high mortality in drought but to suggest that you would take that advantage to commercially exploit them rather than let them have natural selection in a drought, isn’t that ludicrous … it’s at that time that they’re the most vulnerable,” he said.
He said the film led to a 25 per cent fall in the value of exports, which made up about 40 per cent of the market.
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