Over the past couple of years I have become increasingly involved in the protest movement. I have found it uncomfortable at times, even soul destroying. It regularly forces you to experience first hand, some of the things in the world that you most detest. The more I experience however, the more I realise that ignorance is no way to live, that not only do a small group of passionate people possess the power to change the world in which they live, it is indeed, the only thing that ever has.
The first few photos are actually of a whaling protest me and some friends showed up to only to find we had been given the wrong date (Greenpeace, I'm looking at you), so there was not much protesting and allot of playing with adorable children =)
The latter images document a recent protest action against an ACT Government approved cull of a few thousand kangaroos at the Department of Defence site, Majura ACT. The cull is based on a 'scientific' report of these grasslands that has found the residing population of kangaroos to be starving. The report states clearly that orphaned joeys will not be spared. There lives will be finished by the legal practice of killing joeys; usually by decapitation or bashing them to death with a blunt object.
When two organisms such as a native species of grass and the kangaroo co-evolve on a piece of land for a few million years, a few thousand of the latter to not simply start starving over night. Although I'm a scientist, I don't think you have to be to realise there must be a missing variable in this situation. One possibility is that human expansion has concentrated a population of our native wildlife into an area of grassland that can no longer support their population. Images of these animals at full weight, in a perfectly healthy condition seems to suggest a much more plausible possibility to me however. That is that these kangaroos are not starving at all. That the Department of Defence wish to develop this land. That they know it is simply cheaper and easier to kill these animals than to consider a more humane alternative.
A similar scenario developed last year in Belconnen in which a report (by the same author), was used by Defence to justify the slaughter of a similar number of animals. The area is currently being developed into the new residential suburb of Lawson. Then, as now, calls by the traditional owners of the land to protect the animal they revere as sacred from mass extermination were ignored by the local government.
More information can be found here. If you come to the same conclusion that I have, that this murder of innocent creatures is driven not by compassion, but avarice, please speak out.
