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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: October 2007

Greenpeace says "Eat roos."

 

VICTORIA--Greenpeace Australia on October 10, 2007 endorsed slaughtering kangaroos instead of cattle as a purported way to fight global warming.

The argument for eating kangaroos was prominently featured in the Greenpeace Australia press release promoting Paths to a Low-Carbon Future, a Greenpeace-commissioned report released on October 10 and made available for downloading from the top of the Greenpeace Australia web site.

Kangaroos were actually mentioned in only two sentences of the 30-page report, but the press release mention-- which omitted half the context--won mentions of Paths to a Low-Carbon Future in more than 200 newspapers worldwide within the next 24 hours.

Wrote report author Mark Diesendorf at the bottom of page 16, "This report proposes to reduce beef consumption by 20%, as this agricultural sector makes the biggest contribution to Australia's methane emissions. This could be accomplished by shifting to kangaroo meat and/or lower-meat diets."

At the bottom of page 23, Diesendorf elaborated, "The second agriculture measure, a 20% reduction in beef production from 1990 levels...could be accomplished by shifting to kangaroo meat and/or lower-meat diets."

The Greenpeace Australia press release omitted mention of eating less meat.

Opposition to kangaroo massacres was among the issues that built Greenpeace Australia, but Greenpeace energy campaigner Mark Wakeham "urged Aussies to substitute some red meat for roo to help reduce land clearing and the release of methane gas from flatulent cattle and sheep," reported Karen Collier of the Victoria Herald-Sun.

Diesendorf readily defended his recommendation to eat kangaroos, without reference to eating less meat. "Kangaroos do not emit greenhouse gases. They are not hooved animals either so they don't damage the soil," Diesendorf told Collier. "There is a small sub-set of environmentalists who see the kangaroo as a cuddly animal who should be left alone. They are entitled to their view, but more and more people are moving toward eating it."

Noting that Diesendorf had given eating less meat equal prominence with eating kangaroos in Paths to a Low-Carbon Future, and had apparently not mentioned eating kangaroos in a decade of work for the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology in Sydney, ANIMAL PEOPLE asked him by e-mail if he had been misquoted or misrepresented. At deadline he had not responded.

Meanwhile, observed Collier, "The Greenpeace report has renewed calls for Victoria to lift a ban on harvesting roos for food," led by the Kangaroo Industry Association of Australia.

Kangaroo meat is sold in Victoria, but is imported from other parts of Australia. Kangaroo meat is also exported from Australia to Germany, Russia, Belgium, and France.

The Kangaroo Industry Association of Australia has been aggressively working to expand the global market for kangaroo meat and leather, backed by the Australian government. Allied with the athletic shoe industry, KIAA in 1995 persuaded the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to end a 1974 prohibition on kangaroo leather imports into the U.S., and during the 2007 California state legislative session won the repeal of a 1971 California ban on kangaroo leather sales. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the repeal into law on October 13, 2007.

Of the three million adult kangaroos who are hunted each year, about 60% are reportedly butchered for human consumption, while the rest are rendered into pet food, as are as many as three joeys in the pouch who are killed with each female.

The current kangaroo hunting quotas, originally set at 5% of the population of species legal to hunt, now amount to 10% or more, as the kangaroo numbers have fallen by half during five years of drought.

"Australia is the driest, most fragile continent on earth," Australian Wildlife Protection Council president Maryland Wilson told Steve Dow of the Sydney Morning Herald in September 2007. "If people want to eat meat," Wilson added, "let them get it from a country that is able to produce it."

Her message was not well received by the Australian livestock industry. Australia exports more live animals to slaughter, mostly in the Middle East, than any other nation, and is also among the world leaders in total livestock production and exports of frozen meat.

Goodbye to Joey

The Greenpeace Australia position favoring kangaroo slaughter broke sharply from Greenpeace history.

Recalled Paul Watson, who founded the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in 1977, seven years after becoming the youngest cofounder of the first organization to bear the Greenpeace name, "Back in 1986, Greenpeace produced a film about the commercial slaughter of the kangaroos in Australia. The film was called Goodbye to Joey, and it denounced the wholesale slaughter of kangaroos. According to Australian Greenpeace spokesperson Trevor Daley, Greenpeace opposed the commercial trade of kangaroo products on ecological and moral grounds."

Distributed in Europe and the U.S., Goodbye to Joey was used in campaigns to ban imports of kangaroo products.

"It is bad enough that Greenpeace no longer opposes the mass slaughter of harp seals in Canada," Watson said. "It is tragic that Greenpeace continues to support the trophy hunting of polar bears in Alaska and Canada. But to openly support the largest massacre of any wildlife species on the planet is going beyond the bounds of acceptability."

Added Al "Jet" Johnson, the now-retired airline pilot who founded Greenpeace USA, and was a member of the film crew that made Goodbye to Joey, "This is inexcusable. How can we produce a passionate film denouncing the horrific kangaroo slaughter and then advocate the mass slaughter of kangaroos a few years later?"