Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Number Game: Counting Kangaroos, David Brooks

Animal Studies Journal

Well over one million kangaroos are shot each year in New South Wales, around half of them for the kangaroo ‘industry’, a harvest underpinned by the annual supply of population estimates sustaining the widespread impression that kangaroos are a ‘pest’, ‘in plague proportions’. Each year these figures, added to historical tables (typically from 1990 onward), are published as part of the state’s Quota Report, upon which the following year’s shooting quota is based. Drawn from aerial surveys, these estimates are nevertheless characterised by the persistent incidence of extraordinary annual population growth rates, well in excess of biological possibility. This …