Culling on Kangaroo Island

Kangaroo Island is a fascinating example of how humans can exert slight changes in the balance of the ecosystem, and in turn dramatically alter the composition of the individual species within it. It is also an example of modern environmental scientists neglecting science as they alter the balance of the ecosystem in a way that is conducive to their financial and moral empowerment.

Kangaroo Island is Australia's third largest island. It exists off the coast of South Australia and covers an area of 4,405 km². It was separated from mainland Australia by a rise in sea level about 9,000 years ago. Remnant stone tools and charcoal suggest that hunter gatherers occupied the land at least 11,000 years ago and disappeared from it around 200 BC. Theories about their disappearance include disease, inbreeding, warfare, climatic change or exodus.

Joining hunter gatherers in extinction from the Island were the Thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger), Tasmanian Devil, Wombat, Platypus and Koala.

In the 2000 years following the extinction of its hunter gatherers, Kangaroo Island developed a unique ecology completely independent of humans. Humans re-populated the island in the 19th century when escaped Convicts moved in and commenced a lifestyle similar to hunter gatherers. They hunted Seals, Echidna, Wallaby, lived in fur and traded with passing ships. Pastoralists then moved in and started farming. They also introduced the rabbit, but it quickly died out.

The innability of the rabbit to ever take hold showed how slight changes in the ecosystem's balance can have a huge influence on the ability of foreign species to prosper. As Kangaroo Island had been free of hunter gatherers and foxes, Goannas existed in high numbers. When rabbits were introduced, they bred, but were quickly eliminated by Goannas that were able to crawl down their holes and consume their young.

The Tamar Wallaby was another animal that benefited from the absence of foxes. On the mainland, the fox hunted the Tamar Wallaby to virtual extinction. On Kangaroo Island; however, it still exists in such high numbers that 20,000 to 40,000 are culled/slaughtered annually.

In the 1930s, environmental scientists decided Kangaroo Island would make a great Noahs ark for mainland species under threat. Koala, Possums, Platypus, and Wombats were introduced. Although the plan worked quite well, some negative side-effects were caused by predators not being introduced with the herbivores. Koalas were so successful on the island that they reached plague proportions. With no predators constraining their population growth, Koalas started eating gum tress to extinction.

All things considered, the prosperity of the Koalas wasn't a huge problem. Every successful wild animal suffers some kind of population pressures that leads to starvation before it finds a new balance with the ecosystem. Furthermore, the abundance of Koalas attracts 140,000 tourists a year, and the tourism industry gives a powerful incentive to retain much of the land as wilderness instead of clearing it for agriculture. If there were less Koalas, there would be less tourists and more farmland.

Despite the insignificant nature of the Koala problem, environmental scientists demanded that something be done, and naturally, that something involved a great deal of remuneration for environmental scientists. The environmental scientists argued that governments needed to pay for Koalas to be culled, relocated to the mainland or sterilised. They also wanted government to pay for community education programs, otherwise known as propaganda, to justify what they were doing. Consequently, between 1997 and 2005 the government paid for the sterilisation of 3,400 adult Koalas and relocated a further 1,000. Each sterilisation cost around $140. Needless to say, the remaining Koalas kept breeding, the gum trees remained under the threat of extinction, and environmental scientists kept asking for more money to research and manage the Koala problem. At last count, the Koala population was estimated at 30,000.

Eventually the government wised up and realised that the management solution was more of a revenue making scheme for environmental scientists than a genuine effort to save gum trees. A far cheaper solution would have been to simply isolate valued gum trees, and wrap aluminium or plastic guards around them to prevent Koalas climbing up. In city areas, such guards are used to keep possums out of trees. Not only would the aluminium guards protect a diverse range of gum trees, they could also be specifically placed on those gum trees being used by other species of Kangaroo Island wildlife. Admittedly, the aluminium guards would not prevent thousands of Koalas starving to death. However, the Koalas that starved to death would be the weakest of the species. They would be the ones that could not fight for a gum tree or lacked energy reserves. This would not be a bad outcome. A natural rate of attrition is far superior to the indiscriminate slaughtering, which can eliminate the strongest of the species.

For aesthetic reasons, some people are hostile to the thought of using aluminium guards because the guards would corrupt their views. If views of aluminium guards are too onerous for people to put up with, and Koalas must die to protect pristine views, then a natural predator, such as the Tasmanian Devil, could be introduced to do the killing of Koalas for humans. Although the Devils wouldn't be able to climb trees to hunt Koala, they could pick off hungry Koalas trying to move from one cluster of trees to another along the ground. On the mainland, Dingos hunt the Koala in this way and so help keep Koala populations under control.

Even though the Koala problem really isn't much of a problem, and the solutions would quite simple and cheap if it were, modern environmental scientists have dramatised the situation in order to build support for their illogical and expensive "solutions." The scientists want to cull, sterilise, and relocate Koalas because its profitable for them. Their "solutions" would never allow Koalas to find a balance with the Kangaroo Island habitat, and environmental scientists would have to be paid to carry out the task forever.

Aside from wanting money, environmental scientists also have "moral" agendas that motivate them to kill Koalas. They argue that the Koala has no right to exist on Kangaroo Island as it was reintroduced by humans in the 1920s. According to David Paton, an environmental "scientist" from the University of Adelaide:

"You are going to cause major problems for other species -- other species that are endemic to the island. Those things have a right, a greater right, to be here than koalas."

If scientific decisions must be made on moral grounds, then a moral case could also be made that the Koala's reintroduction corrected a moral mistake mistake made by humans that probably eradicated them 2,000 years earlier. For ideological reasons; however, the environmental scientists classfy the first humans of the Island to be animals; therefore, whatever extinctions occured under their rein is deemed to be part of nature and not to be interferrred with.

Even if it were accepted that the hunter gatherers were sub-human animals, and that Koalas have no moral right to exist on the Island, then the same argument would stipulate that environmental scientists don't have any moral right to exist on the Island either. In fact, a moral argument could be made that environmental scientists don't have a moral right to exist at all, anywhere. No ecosystem benefits when one of its members elevates itself to the role of judge, jury and policeman that goes around slaughtering any other member that it believes has no "moral" right to exist. To the contrary, the ecosystem benefits when all individual species are allowed to express themselves unfetted, and as long as there is biodiversity, a balance will eventually be struck that preserves a role for most of the species, as well as allowing for a relatively smooth adaptation to inevitable climatic changes. Species will die out, and new species will emerge, as has always been the case. Any attempts to deny this change, and lock the ecosystem in a moment of time, will inevitably result in its eventual collapse.