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Koalas Gone Wild
Mabon writes "CNN reports that 30,000 of the starving animals are destroying the ecosystem by stripping away the greenery. The Austrailian government proposes shooting some 20,000 of them to reduce the amount of gum trees used by the animals."
As Pets!
I can't wait to have my own Koala!
That CNN article is the most useless one I've read in ages. It fails to provide any of the following information:
1) How would nature control population growth in koalas?
2) Have we in some way removed that control and can it be re-introduced.
All the article talks about is why we should or should not shoot them. There is no indication whatsoever that anybody cares why the koalas are overpopulated (and no, a quick blurb about urbanization doesn't count).
Personally its not God I dislike, its his fan club I cant stand (bash.org)
They only eat one type of food, you know and that is a poor adapation imho. I bet they taste like it too, icky. Unless you want your meat to taste like an herbal cough drop.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Those aren't koalas, they're drop bears!
A drop bear is an animal similar to a koala, but slightly larger, with sharper claws and teeth adapted for eating meat. The primary food of the drop bear is other animals, however, they have been known to go after humans, particularly overseas tourists. Their name derives from their means of hunting: they lurk in trees, and drop down on their unsuspecting victims.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Unless you want your meat to taste like an herbal cough drop
Buckley's koala burgers.
They taste terrible
But they work.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Here in Canberra, we recently had some fairly significant bushfires (Brushfires to US readers.. though I agree with a slashdot poster of a few months back, who thought that brushfire sounded like a problem caused by overactive grooming...).
As part of the fires, one of our wonderful nature parks ( Tidbinbilla) has lost all but one of their Koalas. Now that leaves are starting to come back onto the trees once more, it might be a good time to try and acquire some more koalas.. This would seem to be an ideal opportunity to bring back a koala population into the area.
I suspect though, that the costs might be somewhat prohibitive, and I'm not really sure about territorial habits of Koalas, so there might be other factors that would make transferrel difficult.
Red.
No, animals were harmed in the making of this post.
If you kill them without damaging their lovely coats you could remove the insides and stuff them with something safe so they can be sold to children as cuddly toys. Hmmm...you'd probably have to replace the eyes too. Can't wait to see them in stores!
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
This is happening on Kangaraoo island, off the coast of south australia.
Koalas were introduced here by humans in the 1920's.
They are not a natural part of the ecosystem.
Forget pets, I bet they would make nice, soft, fuzzy slippers.
This story is something I've been keeping track of for the past ten years or so, because I actually used to live on Kangaroo Island (lovely place, don't miss it if you're visiting South Australia).
As mentioned above, the koalas were introduced to KI early last century, and thus have nothing to regulate their population growth as they do on the mainland.
The problem was first brought up about a decade ago, when scientists studying the koalas noticed how large the population was getting, and predicted they'd start stripping their own food sources in a few years. Around that time, the idea of a cull by professional shooters was quietly raised, discussed, and concluded by various intelligent folk to be a good idea.
Then some idiot journalist got hold of it, and beat up a huge story: "They're planning to shoot hundreds of our cute, cuddly national icons!!!"
After the media stink from that, the fucking State Government stated that they would ban the shooting of the koalas. Like it was something to do with them.
Anyway, to show they were doing something about the koala overpopulation problem, they instituted a capture and sterilization program. Yes, they thought they'd stop all those naughty koalas breeding, but leave them in place. Aside from the lifespan of a koala being such that they're still going to destroy their habitat, it's being completely ineffectively implimented.
It takes about two to four man-hours to find and capture one koala. Sterilizing them is another half hour to hour operation, and then they've got to be kept in a cage for a day or so...
I know one of the two (yes, two) vets working on this, and he's got no illusions that it's anything more than a political sop to the idiot majority who can't bear the thought of shooting those cute little animals.
The fact that the notion of culling them has now arisen again shows just how effective this program has been.
And do you know what? The local media are still running with the same fucking slant!!
"They're going to shoot all these cute little koala bears, how awful!"
I think 30,000 koalas starving to death would be a damn sight worse, and far crueler. I'm in favour of the cull.
Oh, and before you ask, we can't really ship them anywhere else. Unless you know somewhere that's able to accomodate 20,000 koalas on short notice, and have a few million dollars to implement the move.
|>
Here be Dragons
Seriously--if you have to kill them anyway, why waste all that meat? Besides there's plenty of carnivores like me who'd be interested in trying them out for no other reason than culinary curiosity. Other places have taken similar steps: Lousiana has a problem with damage done by nutria (think sorta like a muskrat) that was once prized as a furbearer but now is regarded as an invasive species and as a nuisance. The solution provided by the website: "The Coastwide Nutria Control Program, paired with the promotion of nutria meat as a high-protein, low-fat food source, is the main hope for Louisiana's coast." Yum.
The government proposes shooting 20,000 of them
That would be a pretty damned expensive operation. Factoring in:
=+=1000's of litres of gas for jeeps to track the koalas.
=+=hiring people to shoot the koalas - unless its done by volunteers.
=+=25000 rounds of ammo. Hunters may miss the koala, or hit it in a non-critical area (legs, arms). Where's an aimbot when you need one?
=+=hauling of 20000 dead koalas. A few solid transport trucks should do the trick.
Their best bet would be to sell off the dead koalas to make back some of the money. Koala Burgers anyone?
Frink: Nice try floyd, but you were designed for scrubbing, and scrubbing is what you shall do.
I for one am really disappointed in the Slashdot editors. You'd think that if they were to tempt us with "Koalas Gone Wild" they would at least mention some of their spring break and Mardi Gras antics.
They sure as hell won't try to shoot down our helicopters when we try to feed them.
Frankly, they should be thankful they don't have those ear-scorpions.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
eat the cuddly ones before they eat us
Thomas' sig says:
re: stupidity, why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?
Because then the advice, "Do not look at laser with remaining eye" wouldn't be nearly as funny.
There was a Koala bear that decided he was tired of the boring life in Australia, and decided he would go to NYC.
On his first day there, he picked up a lady of the evening.
When he was finished he stood up and went for the door. The hooker said, "excuse me but aren't you forgetting something?", and he replied, "I don't 'think so".
The hooker grabs a dictionary and looks up the word 'hooker' and shows it to him. 'Hooker = A lady who has sex for money.'
"Really", he said, and proceeded to look up 'Koala Bear' in the dictionary to show her:
'Koala: An Australian marsupial that eats bushes, shoots, and leaves.'
Just read the posts, they are NOT native to the landmass where the culling is proposed, and should probably be wiped out in total from that area. Are you saying we should let them live there, strip the environment, and threaten native ecology, just as nonnative species and human encroachment does to them? That makes you sound pretty hypocritical.
Q
Insert Signature Here
Animals are cute, till there are too many.
Welcome to the Entropy Bar, may I take your order?
Oh man, just start a rumor that Koala meat is a delicacy and a powerful aphrodisiac (like shark fin, powdered tiger penis, etc) in Japan and sell them for $1,300 a kilo in Tokyo. No better way to clean out an entire species than to get Nippon thinking that it is a delicacy or a powerful aphrodisiac.
BTW - no joke. Look at the poor sharks, blubber whales, tigers, etc. The trick isn't getting them to start, it is getting them to stop.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Could it be that you negelected to read the article, or even to search for "koalas" and "ecological damage" on Google before responding? Australia is a continent. Kangaroo Island is just that - an island - and you don't even have to visit Australia to find that out.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
I bet if it was 30,000 girls gone wild, there wouldn't be any talk of shooting them.
Read yourself. How do you think they got where they are today?
They were minding their own business and sticking to their areas until the Shanghai businessmen came along.
Not that any of this is news if you're at least 14 years old. It was all over AU Newsweek in a cover story at the time. It required only you be able to read.
Sorry if that would have been too much for you.
If my post suggests to you I am hypocritical, yours suggests you are ignorant.
Maybe that island has suffered Gum-Tree-Overgrowth followed by Koala Population boom followed by denudation followed by mass Koala Starvation followed by Gum-tree-overgrowth cycles since time immemorial. Perhaps without the mass die-off of Gum-Trees, other trees/plants will go extinct causing a whole other chain reaction that will screw up the island some other way.
Eat at Joe's.
So by your argument, all Humans except those in africa should be culled....
I hate the "not native" argument. Life grows, expands, adapts and dies out all the time.
What if they had come across to the island on a log? Are they native because they made it on their own? Or do we simply look at the world as it was when we started recording history and decide that is how the world was, is and always should be?
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Doesn't matter to this situation how the mainland ones became threatened, nor how they got where they are, only that they don't belong there now, are harmful now and it just seems stupid to let them destroy all the trees and themselves, or to expend vast resources to preserve them without culling, if thats even possible.
If you don't like the non-native arguement, stop treating your diseases, you're repelling organisms trying to spread to a new environment. Your body may die but oh well, they have the right to spread there regardless of the impact on the viability of that environment. Rediculousness aside, if they came did come across on logs and actually established a breeding population, I suppose they'd wipe out the trees, die off completley, and eventually seeds would sprout and the trees would replenish over 1000's of years. But I don't suppose kudzu could come across from Japan on a log, and I don't think anyone is happy to see what its doing now. Besides, if you want to leave it to survival of the fittest on a planetary level, we win, and anything living anywhere that we don't preserve to support ourselves(Which is much of our reason for conservation) is there on our good graces because we decided we like it that way.
I dunno, maybe it was naturalized or something, but back in 1985 I went to some kind of nature park or something in Australia, and was allowed to hold a koala. They do stink, for sure - a diet of eucalyptus is bound to cause a certain pungency in one's sweat! (Try eating a lot of garlic for a week - you will sweat garlic odor.) The koala was slow, very slow, but not particularly grouchy or irritable. It seemed to enjoy it.
Of course, this was basically a touristy thing, not a natural environment by any means. So it's not much of an example. Maybe they give the koalas happy pills, or maybe these were raised 'in hand', and so were more amenable. By way of example, parrots and other birds that are hand-raised are much better with people than wild birds.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
There is no 'Disney' solution to the problem.
Why? Don't you think that a Disney camera crew could herd them off a cliff and film it for a "Wild Australia" movie?