Thursday, April 14, 2016

Wild animals used for food

1681: 

In my local supermarket, at the meat counter, I see that there are some ‘wild’ products - notably kangaroo meat. They stock various cuts of kangaroo including fillets, steaks, minced meat and 'kanga bangas'  (kangaroo sausages). While some kangaroo is sold for human consumption it is mainly sold as dog meat.        


People don’t really want to know what happens to these animals when they are being hunted. The kangaroo here in Australia is a wild creature. It is not farmed because it can’t be domesticated or fenced in or made docile in captivity, so the teams of hunters go out at night, and in the glare of spotlights the kangaroos are shot at. Their young, too small to be useful, are clubbed to death or left alive for predators to kill. Perhaps the killing of these animals supplements the income of farmers but I suspect there’s some pleasure involved in the ‘sport’ of kangaroo-shooting.

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