Get Trapped - Pest Management Services

Managing kangaroos and their impact on landscapes.
Seasonal conditions, not the commercial harvest, are the main influence on kangaroo populations. Their numbers rise and fall in response to wetter and drier periods over a time scale of several years (black line). The maximum allowable harvest of kangaroos in Australia (red line) is 15-17% of the population (depending on species). The actual harvest (yellow line) cannot legally go above the red line. Clearly, it is drought (pink bars) that exerts downward pressure on kangaroo populations. Kangaroos compete for water from man-made water sources, damage fences and are a danger to road users, but by far the biggest issue is their impact on pastures. On average, kangaroos consume about 45 per cent of the forage produced on Australia’s southern rangelands. Commercial harvesting of kangaroos serves to reduce the negative impacts associated with unsustainably high populations of the most common kangaroo species for which harvesting is allowed. Reducing kangaroo numbers to sustainable levels with commercial harvesting gives the remaining kangaroos a better chance of surviving droughts.