In this BBC News article referring to David Hick’s guilty plea, they refer to him as a “former farm hand and kangaroo skinner”.
I was struck by his prior occupation. How many kangaroos are skinned each year? Is their meat edible? Does it taste like chicken? Or is it their fur that is valuable? I’ve really never thought about kangaroos as a natural resource…
I leave these questions for my antipodean colleagues to research. I’m sure the answers will surprise us all.
And this is just odd. A toad the size of a dog.
I have to say, I’m thinking of emigrating to Australia just because it’s so freakin’ weird – in an intriguing way. And with Attacks of Giant Cane Toads, there won’t be much space in the papers for anti-gay rhetoric.
If you’re covered in a kangaroo-pelt cloak, does it make you less of a target for packs of Giant Cane Toads?
(I presume “cane” means, for example, sugar cane, and not some uniquely Australian S&M fetish.)
March 27, 2007 at 9:36 pm |
Yes, kangaroo is edible. Highly edible in fact. It’s a highly prized meat, particularly outside of Australia and has a very low fat content (so you do have to be gentle when you cook it otherwise it gets tough). It taste like beef. Kanagroo fur is valuable, I guess, I think the hides would probably be tanned into leather, though.
That is a ginormous cane toad. Much bigger than normal – an absolute freak show. lol and yes, cane refers to sugar cane. Cane toads were introduced into Australia to eat a cane beetle that was decimating crops. Unfortunately, they didn’t do that and started breeding like mad here, decimating local wildlife (particularly native frogs).
March 27, 2007 at 9:41 pm |
Wasn’t there a similar problem with rabbits, way back when?
I don’t think I could eat a kangaroo. (Well, not a whole one, anyway). They look too cute.
March 28, 2007 at 1:52 pm |
Kangaroo steak looks just like regular steak so you don’t get the fluffy connotation
We still have a problem with rabbits – we tried killing them with myxamatosis but that’s not working as well as it used to. All we really have that can contain them is huge rabbit fences that straddle whole states – to prevent their spread across the whole country.
March 28, 2007 at 4:40 pm |
Hence the title of the movie “Rabbit-Proof Fence”.
It’s interesting from a scientific point of view, I guess; introducing niche species into a different radiation of animals (e.g. marsupials, etc) where they don’t have natural predators is, obviously (in hindsight), a Bad Idea. Didn’t they try foxes for the rabbits?
March 28, 2007 at 10:30 pm |
We eat kangaroo every week. It is fantastic meat, much more flavourful than beef and has already been noted very low in fat. It is also the same price as steak now, sometimes cheaper.
Foxes were introduced for ‘the hunt’. They are also a big problem.