Aussie John's Site

Feral Animals in Australia

Here are some feral animals which are periodically culled, controlled, rounded up, have their numbers reduced (and several more euphorisms for shot) in Australia.

Euphorism of the Month: "Scientifically Culled"
..which means kill as many as you can while staying within the allocated budget.

Truth is these animals are here to stay. Wild horses, goats and pigs for example in a given area can be reduced in numbers (believe me they can't be shot out) and the surviviors will breed up very rapidly to the level the region can sustain within 4 or 5 years or less. Quite an involved business. Maybe they should be left alone. That's one answer but not necessarily an answer to erosion, or preserving native specie habitat.

Of course it's urbanisation of the Australian coastal fringe, logging and the wholesale clearing of land for agriculture and stocking with domestic animals that has been destroying native habitat and causing erosion and all the rest of it. We can't lay it all the responsibility on some poor bloody feral animal which we brought into the country in the first place.

Camels.

There's about 300,000 camels in the wild and this number is expected to double in six years with even a conservative estimates saying there will be over a million in 10 years. If we killed 50,000 a year starting now we could keep numbers fairly constant. The Australian Camel Institute, formed in 1995 as a response to the looming threat of increasing camel numbers, estimates it is currently costing $40 dollars to kill each camel so someone has to spend up to two million dollars a year just to maintain the problem at the current level.

There are millions of people around the world who have a cultural background that has included eating camel meat in but only one small company in central Australia, Strath Meats, kill and dress about 10 camels a week They do not have an export licence so the 500 or so camels a year they process is consumed locally.

Interestingly Australia is the only country in the world now with wild Dromedary (single hump) camels. These were the camels brought to Australia because they handled the dry conditions better than the two hump camels.

Camels were first imported from the Cannary Islands, of all places, in 1840 and an estimated 10 to 12 thousand were brought in up TO 1907. Camels made a significant contribution to the development of Australia.

A couple of the photo's below are not feral animals but victims. Can you spot the ring-ins?