Commercial kangaroo shooters are regulated under a national code that's supposed to protect animal welfare, but activists say what happens in rural Australia at night can be in breach and cruel. As global sportswear brands and US politicians move to phase out the use of kangaroo leather, exporters are fighting to protect their industry.
Warning: This story contains graphic vision and images that may be distressing to the viewer.
The township of Dunkeld sits at the foot of Mount Sturgeon (Wurgarri), nestled into the southern tip of Victoria's Grampians region.
Jane Gibb and her partner Frank Jesse moved here 17 years ago in search of a tranquil place to set up their yoga retreat.
For several years, she says they found just that.
"We cohabited peacefully with our neighbours and the people in the community … a lot of interaction with nature," she says.
But that changed in 2017, she says, when commercial kangaroo shooters moved into the area.
"[They] started shooting kangaroos very close to our property … like 60 metres away from our front door," Ms Gibb says.
At times she's been woken at 3am by gunshots, to find lights shining through her property.
"I had a spotlight shone on me when I was near the front gate one night," she says.
"You think, 'Oh, they're coming in, this is a home invasion,' … it's been very, very traumatising.
"We live in a situation where we're frightened. We are frightened in our own home."
Commercial kangaroo shooters are required to adhere to standards of humane killing, set out by a national code of practice that was revised in 2020.
The code requires them to be correctly licensed and they are required to kill each kangaroo with a single shot to the head. They need to ensure the animal is dead before targeting another one.
But hunting takes place after dusk, which makes it hard for even the most experienced shooter to get a clean, single shot to the head.
ABC News has obtained footage from animal welfare activists which appears to show that commercial shooters are not always fully adhering to the code, and that kangaroos are not always killed instantly, causing suffering.
The footage below shows a kangaroo being shot by a commercial shooter in NSW in April. It appears to not be killed instantly and is struggling once the commercial shooter picks the animal up to hang it on his truck.
The kangaroo is dragged, lifted onto a hook on the side of the truck and is struggling with all limbs — its forearms, hind legs and tail — flapping about. It then has its throat cut while still alive and is bleeding out as the shooter gets back into the truck and drives away.
A former kangaroo shooter has told ABC News they believe the kangaroo was alive and aware of what was happening, and that this shooter was not working within the code of practice.
A wildlife veterinarian contacted by ABC News says: "The kangaroo is kicking and thrashing, which indicates it is alive and suffering as it's dragged and hung onto the truck."
A former law enforcement officer who dealt with cases of animal cruelty told ABC News: "The kangaroo appears to still be alive and it would have been suffering."
The animal rights activists who obtained the footage made an animal cruelty complaint to RSPCA NSW six weeks ago but have still not heard back.
RSPCA NSW says it is investigating the matter.
Loading...The most contentious issue is the killing of female kangaroos with joeys and what happens to their offspring when the mothers are killed.
There is no requirement for shooters to report the number of joeys killed, or number of joeys that were not killed and fled.
Hunters are encouraged — but not legally required — to avoid killing females that clearly have joeys in their pouches or young standing nearby.
If they do shoot a female with a joey, the code recommends the joey be killed as soon as possible by a "single sharp blow to the central skull". But activists say they have evidence that does not always happen.
"The Australian code, when it comes to the treatment of the joey, says to bash the animal's head in … and there's no-one from the government out in the dead of night to monitor this," says Washington-based animal rights activist Wayne Pacelle.
The code was updated in 2020 with a list of "DO NOTS" that were made explicit after reports of animal cruelty. They include: "DO NOT hit the joey's head against the railing of the utility rack, as this can result in decapitation rather than the intended concussive blow to the head."
But Mr Pacelle — who spearheaded the Center for a Humane Economy's Kangaroos Are Not Shoes campaign, highlighting what it claims is the inhumane side of kangaroo shooting — argues the code doesn't adequately protect animal welfare.
"The whole thing is an unregulated, inhumane, mass killing commercialised enterprise," Mr Pacelle says.
How kangaroo leather became taboo
Kangaroo leather, known as "K-Leather", had long been regarded by the sportswear and fashion industry as being the highest quality in the business. Football greats from Pelé to Diego Maradona wore kangaroo-leather soccer boots in their heyday.
In 2002, David Beckham had just led England into the World Cup as team captain when he was singled out by animal rights group Viva! for wearing Adidas Predator football cleats made of kangaroo leather.
Viva! sent Beckham footage showing inhumane killing practices and, by 2006, the soccer star switched to cleats made from a synthetic alternative.
That campaign prompted major global brands including Nike and Puma to ditch using kangaroo leather and replace it with a non-animal-based synthetic material.
ABC News can reveal that sportswear giant New Balance is now also considering ceasing production of kangaroo-leather products by next year. The company was contacted for comment but did not respond by the time of publication.
Adidas has also been under pressure to move but a company spokesman did not commit to doing so, saying: "The share of kangaroo leather in our product material mix plays a minor role and is significantly below 1 per cent because we've been able to substitute kangaroo leather with other innovative materials in many products."
The sportswear industry's moves come after iconic fashion brands including Versace, Prada Group, Chanel, H&M, Diane von Furstenberg, Victoria Beckham, Salvatore Ferragamo and Paul Smith have, since 2019, been ditching kangaroo leather for synthetic alternatives.
As companies turn away from using kangaroo leather, politicians are also circling to stop the trade.
Californian law already bans the use of the kangaroo products, but a new bill – the Kangaroo Protection Act — would prohibit and criminalise the import, transport, and sale of all kangaroo products across the United States for commercial purposes.
The bill was originally proposed two years ago, but never passed. Mr Pacelle says US politicians will reintroduce the bill to both houses within weeks which, if passed, would result in significant fines for breaches.
The European Union is currently also under pressure to ban the import of kangaroo products, following a push from a Dutch group, The Party for Animals, which is allied with the Animal Justice Party in Australia.
The question is, if there's no longer a viable commercial industry driving the culling of kangaroos, will the quotas to kill the animals decrease? Or will the practice, which many activists label as cruel and unnecessary, become more brutal as non-licensed shooters move in to keep kangaroo populations down?
'If we can improve, we will improve'
Kangaroo products are a relatively small export market — worth about $200 million a year to Australia's economy, according to the Kangaroo Industry Association of Australia (KIAA).
The United States was once the second-largest market for sporting shoes using kangaroo skin, after the EU, but the industry has been unable to provide new estimates of the size of the market given the laws in California and the move away from K-Leather by major brands shrinking exports to the US.
"The influence of US legislation extends globally and impacts the entire industry, as numerous manufacturers of bags, shoes, jackets, and other products sell into the US market," the KIAA said in a statement.
Ray Borda is KIAA's president, as well as founder and managing director of Macro Group Australia — a producer of wild game meat, including kangaroo.
He says his company exports to more than 50 countries, and industry is working with the government on how they can tap new markets in Asia, and new brands, to buy kangaroo leather.
He defends the industry's track record, suggesting that: "The kangaroo management program is the most heavily audited, inspected animal processing practice in the world, and if we can improve, we will improve."
He notes the quota for shooting kangaroos is not set by industry but by state governments.
"We're dealing with professional people that do the job day in, day out," Mr Borda says.
"If a farmer has to take matters into his own hands, that's different. That's what we call non-commercial. And I've got to say, the commercial industry does not support the non-commercial industry."
'Some sort of massacre going on'
But, in Dunkeld, Ms Gibb is hoping that other major brands will follow Nike and Puma and that it will eventually remove the incentive for commercial shooting.
She says apart from the disruption to her business the shooting causes, there have been cases of shooters dumping dead kangaroo body parts quite close to her property where she can smell them, and where retreat guests have come across them.
"When I was going out walking one day I discovered a whole lot of kangaroo heads, they'd been chopped off the kangaroos [and] their paws had been cut off," she says.
"I had not heard of … this sort of killing before. I became immediately very frightened, I thought, 'Well, someone crazy is in the area, there's some sort of massacre going on.'
"I rang the police. And of course, the police said, 'That's just a commercial shooter.'"
Over 2021, she says she found 28 joeys abandoned in paddocks after their mothers had been shot.
She believes some had suffered without food in the paddocks, and some had to be euthanased soon after, but all eventually died.
Ms Gibb says she hasn't seen shooters in the area since June last year, but fears their return.
Commercial and non-commercial shooters must obtain permits from state governments before they can kill kangaroos in a designated area.
Once the kangaroos are shot, new population estimates of kangaroos via aerial surveys are undertaken, new quotas are set, and the commercial shooters can move back in.
Ms Gibb says, despite shooting between 2017 and 2022 reducing the number of kangaroos in the area, the "harvesting quotas" (the number of kangaroos allowed to be shot) have increased in the Lower Wimmera region from 30,550 in 2022 to 41,100 in 2023.
Ms Gibb says on several occasions the "shooting episodes" took place while she was running retreats.
"One of our guests found one of the kangaroo heads on the walking path just out the front of our property — they were quite distressed by that," Ms Gibb says.
She says the kangaroo shooting issue has divided the local community and, when she took her complaints about the shooting public, there were personal threats against her.
"Someone [a town member] immediately threatened to bash a member of my family up — that's how divisive it is," she says.
A shooter's perspective
In Dunkeld, the man behind the rifle, Dennis Hogan, takes a different view.
Mr Hogan was brought to Dunkeld from NSW to shoot kangaroos for commercial use — the meat is used for pet food and human consumption, while the leather is shipped overseas for use in football boots and other products.
He and Jane Gibb and Frank Jesse have had run-ins over the years that resulted in court applications for intervention orders.
Mr Hogan says most local farmers support what he does, arguing there are too many kangaroos in the area.
The commercial practice, he says, is tightly regulated and he says he adheres to the code of conduct as best he can.
"They check us for tags [that restrict the number of kangaroos each shooter can kill] … You usually go to areas where there's quite an abundance of kangaroos."
He says the price they get paid depends on weight, but each kangaroo shot can fetch $1 to $1.65 a kilo.
Mr Hogan thinks the move away from kangaroo leather by major global brands won't stop kangaroos being killed — "the farmers would employ professional shooters just to cull kangaroos anyway" — but that it could undermine a processor's profits as the leather is lucrative.
"From a processor's point of view, he's losing out, he probably has to put off employees," Mr Hogan says.
Mr Hogan says kangaroo numbers need to be kept under control, as he points to one in the landscape, saying: "That animal should be shot because it's skinny, it's going to die. It's full of worms."
Mr Hogan says every kangaroo must be shot humanely, with one shot to the head.
"If they are [a kangaroo is] shot lower in the neck, or in the body … that shooter will not be paid for that kangaroo, or he'll lose his licence."
Asked if they sometimes miss, Mr Hogan says: "Yes … we do have misses but usually if we miss, it's a clean miss. And if we do happen to not kill one properly, then we're permitted to shoot it in the back or just destroy it straight away — but then we can't sell it."
He says sometimes females with joeys are shot: "You can't shoot all male kangaroos. The females have to be shot as well … If we know that a joey can't survive, we kill it humanely, otherwise, he's going to starve to death."
Mr Hogan says he's happy to abide by tougher regulations — including implementing suggestions from animal welfare groups, such as the RSPCA, for shooters to use a camera device when out shooting.
But he says that won't stop the non-commercial "weekend shooters and just people who just do it just for casually for fun … you've got a lot of cowboy shooters out there."
Are there some 'cowboys' within the kangaroo industry?
The commercial industry says inhumane treatment of kangaroos and their joeys is generally the work of non-commercial shooters.
They argue commercial shooters are required to carry out shooting proficiency tests, whereas non-commercial shooters don't have that requirement.
Ray Borda says sometimes, farmers, who are not trained shooters, take matters into their own hands, "and I've got to say the commercial industry does not support the non-commercial industry".
He argues activists take vision of the non-commercial shooters, "blur the lines and try to make it look like it's the commercial industry".
"The fact is that the commercial industry is very responsible," Mr Borda says.
While activists commonly report cases of cruelty in the non-commercial industry, evidence gathered by ABC News shows that some commercial shooters don't always adhere to the code and kangaroos, including females and their joeys, suffer as a result.
This includes evidence showing a child killing a kangaroo in the presence of a commercial shooter.
In a Facebook post from March 2020, a commercial shooter in Western Australia boasts about how he let his 12-year-old kill a young kangaroo.
A photo of the young boy, which has been blurred, shows him standing holding the small kangaroo and is captioned, "at approximately 120 metres give or take" his son took a shot that "flipped it straight below the mouth and thru (sic) its neck KO it went". It continues "hahaha he was (a) stoked 12yr old, it must be something he won't forget".
Then there are photos that demonstrate kangaroos are not always shot in the head in adherence with the code.
This photo from February shows a kangaroo shot in the neck by a commercial shooter in Western Australia.
In this video from September 2022, taken in Victoria's Hidden Valley, a male kangaroo has been shot in the face.
ABC News cannot confirm whether this injury was caused by a commercial shooter, but Hidden Valley is in Wallan and falls within the Mitchell Shire, which is in the central Victoria shooting area where commercial shooters operate. The kangaroo had to be euthanased.
In 2022, there were 24,414 kangaroos shot by 76 commercial shooters operating in that area.
Other evidence has been collected by activists Greg Keightley and Diane Smith, who participated in the anti-kangaroo hunting documentary Kangaroo: A Love-Hate Story, detailing the dark side of the industry.
Mr Keightley ran as Animal Justice Party candidate for the Blue Mountains at the recent state election and also owns a property near Bathurst dedicated as a wildlife sanctuary.
He says between 2011 and 2019 they collected over 200 heads in commercial harvesting areas in NSW and found that about 40 per cent of kangaroos did not die from a single gunshot wound.
"They're still there: they're in pain, often they run until they fall down, or they're on the ground and they just have to wait there until the kangaroo shooter comes back and finishes them off," Mr Keightley says.
He argues commercial shooters have an incentive to fill their truck by the end of the night.
"They take shortcuts, and they're able to do that because there is no monitoring in the field," he asserts.
Mr Keightley says, in the period they gathered evidence, several of the kangaroos that were shot were females with joeys in their pouches.
He says when the shooter came back, on occasion the joey would be ripped from the pouch and thrown into the darkness to fend for itself.
"What was even more disturbing was going into the killing fields after the harvesters had dismembered the kangaroos — had taken their head and arms and legs, tail, and opened their belly," he explains.
"And seeing the joeys that would come back to those butchering sites where there might be a dozen kangaroos. And often you would find joeys that had found comfort in their mother's remains … that was the saddest thing."
No one to check joeys are treated humanely
If a shooter does kill a female with a joey, the code recommends that joey be killed as soon as possible, with single sharp blow to the skull.
But sometimes joeys are left to starve to death.
It cannot be proven that the following case was attributable to a commercial shooter, but wildlife rescuers argue such instances have been increasing since commercial shooting was legalised in Victoria.
The case also occurred within the central region where commercial shooters operated that year.
In this video from Gisborne in Victoria, which was taken in February 2022, a mother with a joey had been shot, had an infected wound and was unable to move her neck and bend to keep the pouch clean. The joey was left struggling to survive. This video was taken after the kangaroo was euthanased by a wildlife rescuer.
Loading...Other times, joeys are treated as pets. ABC News has seen photos posted to social media by commercial shooters boasting about pulling joeys from their dead mother's pouch and taking them home.
It's unclear what happens to them after they are taken, but their removal is in breach of the code.
The RSPCA, which has had input into the development of the code, has raised questions about how it is being implemented.
Di Evans, a senior scientific officer at RSPCA Australia, suggests that the only solution to completely avoid the potential cruelty to young still in the pouch is not to shoot females at all.
Several years ago, major kangaroo processors adopted this policy. However, some landholders believe that male-only shooting does not remove sufficient kangaroos and so they may also employ a non-commercial shooter to kill females.
"What happens currently, is that heads are removed before they go for processing, and really all that's doing is verifying that there are no body shots but it's not … demonstrating that this individual animal was killed instantly," Dr Evans says.
A recent inquiry in NSW examined the state's kangaroo management program and called on the state government to "publicly release data on all joey deaths occurring in the commercial kangaroo industry, including in-pouch, at-foot, and joeys at-foot who have fled" and to include the number of orphaned joeys when calculating the count for filling quotas.
Dr Evans agrees that, at the very least, shooters should be required to report data on joeys killed or that have fled.
"What we know is that when mothers are killed, there's inevitable suffering of those joeys — they're unlikely to survive. They're at risk of predation, starvation and exposure," she says.
But the NSW government responded to the inquiry that "additional data on dependent young will not add any value to the calculation of a sustainable harvest quota".
Dr Evans also suggests shooters should be required to wear body cameras at night when out shooting to ensure better compliance with the code.
Inquiry hears population estimates used to set quotas are 'flawed'
Although the kangaroo population varies annually, government estimates suggest there are 36.5 million kangaroos in the wild across Australia.
The quotas set to shoot them vary state by state, but it's typically 10 to 17 per cent of that population each year.
In recent years, the take of kangaroos against the quota is falling.
This is happening even as state governments are extending the zones in which kangaroos can be shot for commercial purposes, and new species of kangaroos are added to the list of those that can be shot.
In 2022, the quota was 4.4 million nationally and the actual number killed was about 1.2 million.
However, the data also shows that the take of female kangaroos has increased and is now about 30 per cent of the total killed. The number with joeys is not accounted for in the government's data, but activists estimate it could be as high as 350,000.
The NSW inquiry into the state's kangaroo management program spent much time assessing whether the population estimates used to calculate the quotas were flawed.
Some stakeholders gave evidence that population numbers had been deliberately overestimated by the department, to mask a big decline in numbers and justify inflated harvest quotas for the commercial industry and some landholders who wish to eradicate kangaroos.
One of them was ecologist Ray Mjadwesch.
Government departments, he argues, "change their survey methodologies periodically, or increase their corrections used in analysis".
"There are very serious problems with how kangaroo population estimates are derived," he says.
He says the NSW government years ago used reserve areas to take samples and then used that information to estimate the number of kangaroos in other areas, such as farmland.
"In some farming landscapes, they were flying for 130 kilometres, and neither [of the] observer[s] on either side of the plane were seeing kangaroos," Mr Mjadwesch says.
He says in 2013 he pointed out these flaws to several NSW departments, which then revised their methodology years later.
Mr Mjadwesch argues if the commercial killing of kangaroos continues at the current rate — given the added risk of fire, drought and climate change — some species of kangaroos could be wiped out.
He also challenges state government assumptions on how fast kangaroo populations can increase when large numbers are being killed.
He estimates the maximum biologically possible population growth rate for grey kangaroos is about 10 per cent annually, and 14 per cent for red kangaroos and wallaroos.
Despite that, he says some of the department's quota reports show population increases of as much as 400 per cent in a year for some species in some zones.
Mr Mjadwesch argues state governments have been complicit in expanding the industry and points to expansions across NSW, Victoria and South Australia between 1991 and 2021.
A spokeswoman for the NSW Department of Planning and Environment said: "The surveys use precise and robust scientific methods to estimate kangaroo populations [and] long-term survey data indicates that the populations remain healthy and ecologically viable."
South Australia recently opened Kangaroo Island to commercial operators, expanded zones and added the Eastern Grey Kangaroo and Tamar Wallaby to the list of those that can be shot. This is despite an unprecedented bushfire in 2019-20 burning about 42 per cent of the island and destroying wildlife.
A spokesman for South Australia's Department of Environment and Water confirmed that after commercial harvest (shooting) was suspended on Kangaroo Island in mid-January 2020 until the end of that year, the shooters moved back in early 2021 and are now also able to also shoot those additional species of kangaroo found in the area.
A spokesman for Victoria's Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action said: "Victoria takes a conservative approach when setting maximum kangaroo control levels, which are no more than 10 per cent of the population each year, less than the 15 per cent level considered sustainable and used in other states."
Mr Mjadwesch says despite pointing out modelling flaws over the years, those doing population estimates for state governments are "not at a stage where they're prepared to admit that anything could possibly be wrong".
"We continue to just drive kangaroos over the edge of a cliff," he says.
State governments defend their modelling
The NSW inquiry's final report noted "legitimate questions have been raised" about the methodology used to determine populations and quotas.
It suggested that written and verbal answers provided by the department's scientists involved in the population surveys had not "fully dispelled doubts about whether the methods used are producing accurate enough population counts" and that the department's methodology "lacks transparency".
The NSW government is currently undertaking a review into its kangaroo management program modelling with advice from the Centre for Research into Ecological and Environmental Modelling at the University of St Andrews in London. The findings are expected to be released later this year.
Dr Stuart Cairns, an honorary professor at the University of New England and an ecologist who has done modelling for the state governments (including NSW) to estimate kangaroo populations, says improvements can be made to the survey design but that it's a trade-off with cost.
The inquiry had recommended the department consider using video imaging when surveying kangaroo populations from aircraft. The NSW government responded that would not be an "affordable addition".
"We always strive for a benchmark level of precision of about 20 per cent — generally, we achieve a better precision on that, and sometimes we don't do as well," Dr Cairns says.
The setting of quotas and the management of kangaroo populations, Dr Cairns argues, is built around the idea of what's called "adaptive management", which he says does take into account factors like droughts and fires.
"Drought has a substantial and detrimental impact to kangaroo populations," he says, but adds that "numbers can decline quite rapidly in relation to drought … once the drought turns around, they'll recover".
Dr Cairns doesn't think that expanding the harvest zones and the list of species that can be shot is putting kangaroos at risk and defends state government population estimates and quotas.
"The setting of quotas is done on a cautious basis … and the level of compliance [against the code] within the [commercial] industry is quite high," he argues.
Dr Cairns says the commercial harvesting of kangaroos "represents to some extent a safety valve".
"If there is no commercial harvest, no professional field processes operating, it will become a free-for-all, with landholders being able to take the law into their own hands," he suggests.
Is the end of the industry near?
As the debate about population estimates and quotas plays out, the Kangaroo Industry Association of Australia (KIAA) continues to promote the expansion of the kangaroo skin and meat industry internationally, with the support of Australia's government.
Over the past few years, Australian politicians have joined the industry in heading to Washington to lobby against laws that would ban imports into the US.
Ray Borda says, although major brands Nike and Puma are moving away from K-Leather and the US and EU are considering bans on kangaroo products, he doesn't think it signals the end of the industry,
"People have gone away from K-Leather previously, and will cycle back again," Mr Borda says.
"We're very protective of what we do. And we believe in what we do."
But Mr Pacelle thinks rising moral concern about the industry's conduct, shared by animal rights groups globally, means the industry's days are numbered.
"In the 21st century we will see the end of mass commercial shooting of kangaroos [and] the orphaning of the joeys — we will rid this world of these cruel spectacles," he says.
Jane Gibb hopes the end of the kangaroo trade is near.
"I think it is an indication that at a global level, that the abuse that's been handed out to these animals is not acceptable," she says.
"We have to find another way of living with our wildlife, and preserving our wildlife."
Credits:
Reporting: Nassim Khadem
Photography: Billy Draper, John Gunn, Mark Bennett, Nassim Khadem