Kangaroo numbers Australia wide are now as low as they have ever been. Drought, fires, commercial and non-commercial shooting, road kills and loss of habitat are to blame.

Aerial counts are taken over large areas of Australia once a year. The results are fed into complicated computer model that tries to estimate populations State by State.

Counting methodology has been widely criticised for decades by animal protection groups. Each year the methodology is changed, as are the people doing the counting. As a result there is no long term accurate data to obtain a real picture of population dynamics.

What the figures do show is that kangaroo populations have dropped to an extremely low level in the last few years, in all States.

Early this year for the first time, and without any consultation with their Kangaroo Advisory Committee, NSW National Parks opened a new commercial shooting area North of Canberra. This area had never been commercially shot before, and we always maintained that the reason was that in the traditional shooting areas to the West, the larger kangaroos had been shot out. This assumption was made by noting that the figures from NSW National Parks, figures showing that sizes of kangaroos going into processing plants were only just of breeding age, some not yet old enough to breed.

Kangaroo shooters taking part in the first commercial cull in eastern New South Wales say they've found kangaroos weighing up to 90 kilos. The State Government has permitted a cull of 44,000 kangaroos, and this year is the first of a four-year trial of commercial harvest in the southeast. Shooters say they are filling a chiller a night with up to 60 large bucks from a region that's never been commercially shot before. According to one shooter, kangaroos seem to be twice, three times the sizes that they get out west. Some of them are weighed in here at about 60 kilos, so when they are alive, the live weight would be around 80, 85, 90 kilos possibly. They are also recording the best skins they've ever received from up here, as one can imagine with the cold weather.
This means they are now shooting out the alpha animals, the largest and strongest, those that have survived the drought and the fires, and would have passed on the best genes to future generations.