On the Road to Kangaroo Management?🦘

GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING

This story contains imagery and descriptions some may find upsetting.

The roo rescuers: 'We drink a lot and we cry a lot'
I saw the above news story this morning and couldn't help thinking of my 2016 road-trips throughout Australia and all of the dead wildlife I saw lying dead on the road or to the side of the road -
On the Road with a Grumpy Old Bastard from Stanthorpe

One of the many grim memories from
 a 2016 road-trip of mine

Luckily for me I never saw any half alive animals on my travels, not that I had the time to stop and personally check to see if they weren't dead, because I would be stopping nearly every two kilometres of my journey (that works out to roughly every mile for my American readers) and getting nowhere fast.

For someone like me who grew up watching the TV show 'Skippy the Bush Kangaroo' as a kid, it's like seeing family pets lying dead all over the place.

I loved that show as a kid, even though I saw Sunny as a bit of a Wally and now looking back through the years at that stripped red and white shirt he used to wear a lot, I could imagine a children's book called 'Where's Sunny ... and No Cheating Skip?'.

I'll help you out a bit just in case you can't find him;-)

I'm just full of great ideas when it comes
to children's books, aren't I?

Unfortunately, you can't help but spot dead kangaroos all over Australia's main highways.

I love kangaroos and like it says in the news story, “Farmers like to hate them, motorists run them down, shooters kill them.”

I happen to like crows as well and I'm sure the same things could be said about them by farmers, motorists and shooters, too.
Funny thing is I don't recall ever seeing one crow lying dead on the roads as I drove through Australia, but I saw hundreds of kangaroos, a few wombats and down in Tasmania I saw three dead Tasmanian Devils on the road.
On the Road with Corvids

If you go driving around Australia then you will see plenty of dead roos on the road, but hopefully not too many half alive ones.
My youngest son was telling me that his partner's sister hit a roo accidentally last week in her car when driving them all to a waterfall and felt the roo go under the wheels.
She was too frightened to stop and see what she had done and kept on driving, but she had to come back that same way on the way home and there it was dead on the road for them all to see.
I guess she won't forget that trip to the falls for a while?

"Motor vehicle insurer AAMI says kangaroos accounted for 81 per cent of the 8,810 animal collision-related claims it logged over the past year."

Out here it's become a trend to see kangaroo meat sold in the butcher's section of mainstream supermarkets and even when I ate beef sausages at BBQs and someone would tell me to try a 

kangaroo sausage I couldn't.
To me it was like saying here try a dog, cat, crow, human sausage.
I'm sure they would probably all taste good cooked on the BBQ and served with a nice Chianti.
But not for me thanks.

“I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs
You have to draw the line somewhere when it comes to wildlife and unfortunately sometimes you have to paint the pink X.

Such is life and death on this planet and sometimes it ain't fun being on the road.

It's a jungle out there, so take care.