Question to Aussies, Why don't you ranch Kangaroos?

Mowque said:
Tell me about it, :rolleyes: . good for nothing but trouble. I know most people in the States that raise them use them for clearing the land. Do they have that issue in Australia? ie, environmental degradation due to herding?
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Basically, goats don't have as much of a herd mentality. An example of why they are hard to farm is fencing. Normally, when fencing a paddock, you would put a inwards facing corner post in each corner, to hold up the fence. But with goats, if you do this, they will climb over. They are also more aggressive, or at least less submissive than, say, sheep. And they chew on anything and everything, IIRC. So you can't irrigate a paddock with goats around, for example.
 
Camikaze said:
Basically, goats don't have as much of a herd mentality. An example of why they are hard to farm is fencing. Normally, when fencing a paddock, you would put a inwards facing corner post in each corner, to hold up the fence. But with goats, if you do this, they will climb over. They are also more aggressive, or at least less submissive than, say, sheep. And they chew on anything and everything, IIRC. So you can't irrigate a paddock with goats around, for example.
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I raise these beasts. Your preaching to the choir. I'm merely wondering if goats (which are hard on the environment) are causing more troubles then say, sheep. :)

That bolded part is basically true of anything you do around goats.
 
Mowque said:
I raise these beasts. Your preaching to the choir. I'm merely wondering if goats (which are hard on the environment) are causing more troubles then say, sheep. :)

That bolded part is basically true of anything you do around goats.
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I just remembered another reason why goats are being farmed more and exported more- milk. The milk is cheaper and easier for poorer people to live in.

I can't really remember about environmental consequences of goat farming, but I think that a lot of this farming was taking place in areas with wild goats, which were damaging the environment. Farming them caused less damage then letting them be in the wild. But I'm not sure whether they are any more or less environmentally sustainable than sheep.
 
TheLastOne36 said:
Then make a market. The world can't handle raising cows forever. Ounce the option is there, i'm sure there would be buyers. And who doesn't like rabbi meat?
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One the clear solution is to grow meat in labs but people are to stupid. Two epic mistype.
 
TheLastOne36 said:
oh wow :lol: if it wasn't my own quote, i would've sigged that...
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And now we know that it was in fact the Poles, not the Germans, who are to blame for the Holocaust.
 
We dont ?

I see kangaroo game meat in our local market all the time.
 
maybe if we switch to 'roo in the US we wont have as many fat people, I hear it is a quite lean meat and 'roos don't release methane, win-win right?
 
borrow the fence from Jurassic Park :p
 
There's a kangaroo industry, but they're hunted, not farmed. They're used for food and leather - both human food and dog food.

Of the 25 million kangaroos in Australia, there's a quota of roughly 20% that can be harvested each year. There's actually quite a sophisticated data collection operation aimed at tracking their numbers and movements in specific regions, apparently.

Why aren't they fenced or farmed? This is easy. You don't fence wild game in. Fences aren't just about physically containing animals, they're also about property. People don't need to own or feed kangaroos, it doesn't make sense to farm them when they can be hunted for free. Fences are for keeping your animals on your property and keeping other people's animals off your grass. Land ownership and geography just mean that there's no point to fencing them in or owning them or trying to domesticate them.

The species of kangaroos that get hunted live the arid grasslands where not many people live. These are huge, sparse areas, where the land is either state and national parks, Crown land (government land) or VAST properties for cattle farming. We're talking about areas the size of European countries with a few hundred people living there. In none of these situations is it necessary or feasible to fence the 'roos in.
 
It's because kangaroos aren't domesticatable. If they were, it would have been done a long time ago.
 
It's basically what Arwon said.

The other major issues are (many of which have been touched on):

  1. They get around most fences (unless your willing to put up fences that stop Deer if you've ever seen those you will understand how unpractical it is in large parts of Australia :refer to below point)
  2. Most people have no conception of the distances involved in the larger stations (farms) in Australia. Take Edith River Downs as an example (in my own Territory), they farm one paddock which takes two weeks to get around on Quads, have a hundred thousand head of cattle roaming it, have something like a 100 water sources (bores, springs and standing water) and they control a great deal more land than they actually work (estimated head of cattle: half a million, most of which have never seen a person).
  3. The only areas suitable for 'farming' (I contend its more of a case of giving the Kangaroos water and letting them run wild) on a large scale are in Central Australia. You could run smaller operations elsewhere on smaller sections, but as it stands the margins on Kangaroo are fairly low (you would not substitute sheep for them). They could be run along with existing cattle, given that the competition between the two... is fairly minimal (depending on who you talk to). But it wouldn't really be farming... it would involve shooting, butchering on the spot in mobile abattoirs and then transhipment somewhere else (which was done in the past in the NT on a large scale but was never viable).
  4. As of yet I'm fairly sure the only viable species for 'farming' is the Red Kangaroo and probably Grey you can rule out everything else as to small.
  5. You try selling Kangaroo meat. Some people in Britain objected because Kangaroo's were 'endangered' (most species are not only if you include Wallabies). Most people don't like game meat (myself included). It's difficult to cook. It's also 'cute' (bloody skippy).

Some pilot programs are currently being trialed in the Northern Territory, South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland.. but those are mostly ad-hoc, small scale operations (relatively speaking to the hypothetical market that is possible).

Classical hero said:
It is weird how we eat the animals on our coat of arms.
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Speak for yourself.
 
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