Comments on: Eating Corpses

By: etbe

etbe — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 06:30:43 +0000

Australian Society for Kangaroos: In good seasons animals breed, in bad seasons populations decline due to lack of food. Unlike most animals kangaroos have reasonable control of their reproduction so part of the population decline in bad seasons is due to lack of breeding, but part of it is from death from starvation. If the food is going to run out then reducing the numbers will help those that remain.

http://www.kidcyber.com.au/topics/Austendangered.htm
http://www.kidsplanet.org/factsheets/kangaroo.html

As for extinction, the first URL above suggests that Lumholtz’s Tree-kangaroo is officially regarded as endangered in Australia and the second states that the Tasmanian Forester Kangaroo is officially recognised as endangered in the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_kangaroo
I have not found any reference to the Red Kangaroo being endangered, the wikipedia page suggests that it is of “least concern” which seems to contradict your web page.

Killing the larger and stronger animals won’t cause them to become extinct, merely to evolve to be smaller. Cattle survived quite well after being bred to be smaller than the auroch.

By: damar

damar — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 05:16:44 +0000

It’s immoral to eat meat considering how it is produced. Here is a site that explains how factory farms work:

http://meat.org

By: Australian Society for Kangaroos

Australian Society for Kangaroos — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 04:23:14 +0000

You are philosophically and scientifically incorrect in your reference to the “need to cull wild animals” when they increase in population in good seasons. To kill the fit and healthy members of the kangaroo populaiton,which is done by the commercial kangaroo slaughter, severly destroys the natural evolutionary processes that have made kangaroos so well adapted to Australias environment. Indisciminate killing destroys the genetic diversity and destroys the fittest and healthiest, targeted by our cruel industry in kangaroo products, leaving the weaker and smaller kangaroos to breed,. A recipe for extinction.

By: Jason Nicholls

Jason Nicholls — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 19:24:51 +0000

Davyd has taken out the PLUGgers to a vegetarian restaurant not so long ago when Pia was here. I think most of the people enjoyed it.

Unfortunately Perth is a little starved for vegan/vegetarian restaurants but it’s improving slowly…

By: etbe

etbe — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 01:39:12 +0000

Innismir: The term “corpse” is generally used to refer to a dead animal not a dead plant.

deb user: There is a huge difference between something that you prefer not to do and something that you are not prepared to do. I prefer not to do outdoors stuff which is why I haven’t gone out hunting animals. But I have no hesitation in killing them if necessary (I have killed, cleaned, cooked, and eaten many fish and would have no problem doing the same with larger animals).

Paul: I’m reading Guns Germs and Steel at the moment. I don’t think it would be practical to have kangaroos provide the quantities of meat that we currently eat. But government subsidies to the meat industry will end sooner or later and most people will be unable to afford their current levels of meat consumption. At that time kangaroo will be able to provide a significant portion of the national meat consumption.

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 22:40:29 +0000

There was a letter to Crikey about kangaroo meat earlier this year:

Andrew Dempster (yesterday, comments) asks if kangaroos produce methane, and if
not, why we can’t use them instead of sheep and cattle. Kangaroos don’t produce
methane because of some tricky digestive processes. But they aren’t very
efficient in producing meat. Ruminants ruminate! This enables them to extract
more energy from good pasture than kangaroos which pass food through quickly
and relatively inefficiently.

The kangaroo digestive mechanism is better on bad pasture, they take in and
process a lot of food, while sheep and cattle face a digestive bottleneck. See
Knox’s “Biology” (the standard University biology text) for more detail. The
bottom line here is that kangaroos aren’t efficient meat producers, they don’t
herd, they fight, they jump fences, the mob structure isn’t good for farming,
and no farmer wants to give up cushy evenings watching Big Brother to go out
and shoot kangaroos which is a tough, back breaking and thoroughly unpleasant
job.

The current kangaroo industry can’t get enough shooters to even meet its
current quotas which produces very little meat. Read Jared Diamond’s “Guns
Germs and Steel”. He explains in detail why so few wild animal species have
been domesticated over the millenia – it isn’t for lack of trying. And if you
can’t domesticate them, you have to hunt them. Hunting wild animals has never
and can never support large populations. Again, see Diamond for more details.