African animals to roam Australia ?

Invurt writes: "In a strange twist to the traditional conservation story, Media Magnate Kerry Packer has announced that he is planning to open a huge African game reserve, for reasons of conservation and endangered species breeding in Australia. This would basically replicate Africa in the Australian continent, on a huge scale. They are not sure if they'd leave the kangaroos there or not - always wondered what it'd be like with kangaroos roaming the plains with lions."

Comments

Re:Won't work - kinda

[squaretorus]

A guy called John Wamsley (google search) set up a reserve in Oz to protect Australian species from Cats, Dogs, Toads etc... that had been imported.

He got put in jail. Why? He killed all the Cats, Dogs and Toads on his land. This is against the law as its 'cruel'. The law has since softened - but technically it is still against the law to protect native species to the detriment of introduced ones.

He has been succesful in setting u a number of reserves though - everywhere he has killed Cats the native marsupials etc have thrived. Often coming back from just a few hundred specimens to many thousands.

He sells shares in his reserves to people, to fund purchasing of more land, and maintenence of the existing land. From memory he aims to have 10% of australia set aside as native only reserves within 10 years.

This project should happen in Africa - not Austalia. Its not as if African land is expensive. I'm sure old megabucks Bill Gates could buy the Congo and ship out everything that threatens the wildlife if he wanted to. Those gorillas are so cool!

Re:Won't work

[sam@caveman.org]

having never heard of the rabbit case, but having seen many references to it in this story, i took a look at the Rabbit case. it is almost too amazing to believe, and not helping matters is the similarity to the old children's song, 'there was an old lady who swallows a fly'. if it wasn't so serious a problem, it would be insanely comical. it sounds like a joke:

basically, over a century ago wealthy englishmen brought rabbits to AUS so that they might hunt them. eventually the rabbit population boomed to well over 200 million, becoming more than a nuisance, rather an extremely ferocious natural disaster. they brought in a virus (myxo) to kill the rabbits, and it almost worked, but eventually the rabbits became resistant.

and this is where it gets almost too weird to believe.

they bring in ferrets to hunt the rabbits down. however, the ferrets are found to be carrying bovine tuberculoses. so they release a different strain of myxo to get rid of the ferrets.

so finally they are researching a new virus to kill the rabbits, but the virus escapes the labs and spreads through australia and new zealand. so they come up with a vaccine...

and the saga continues.

on a more USian note, how about introducing a few hundred wolves back into the ecosystem to at least nibble at the incredible deer population? what's a few small children, anyway?

-sam