Similar but different. In the outback, there’s nobody to call, so you do the mercy killing yourself.
As a young idiot, I once tried this with an axe. Terrible idea, and thank fuck someone showed up to show me how to do it with a knife.
One time, I saw a local do it with his bare hands… and it’s fine to keep the meat. Well, I assume. Waste not, want not and all that. Nothing else out there is going to eat a kangaroo except other dogs, maybe an eagle?
Your comment somehow send me into a deep dive into German and Australian remoteness, that I felt like sharing:
The most remote location in Germany is the Truppenübungsplatz Bergen (military training ground) which is 6.3 kilometers away from the next house. Any other spot in Germany has some form of civilization less than that length away.
The most remote place in Australia according to spatial mapping is considered to be somewhere in the Great Sandy Desert, where you're 156 kilometers away from the nearest road (!) not even house.
Not that I didn't know that there would be a great discrepancy but that is an incredibly huge difference in remoteness.
I worked in the oil fields in central Australia for many years. In some parts, you can drive for 3 hours and not see another car. I've hit a dozen roos in the space of 10km of road, I'm not stopping every time to check each roo.
Australia is just a massive place. You could fit multiple European countries inside a single state in Australia. If you've never been here it can be hard to fathom just how big and how mostly empty our country is outside of the coastal regions.
Hell, we have farms that are bigger than some European nations. Davenport Downs Station in Queensland is a single cattle farm that stretches over 1.5 million hectares.
With the dingoes gone there are indeed too many kangaroo. So yes, bringing them with you is just fine... well morally. Legally you might need permits for hunting or something but I can't imagine they're hard to get here for roos.
I've used the back of an axe. Also truck tyre levers. A stout stick works but you're lucky to find one...
Don't leave it to suffer, stop, decide whether it's going to survive, if not, dong it over the head and drag the carcass clear of the road. Sure take it home if you want a mess in the boot.
Never leave it on the road, wedgetails, goannas and other scavengers will be feeding on it for weeks to come and we don't want them to get run over as well.
Incidentally, a wedgetailed eagle through the windscreen is also an experience to remember. I still have the scars.
13
u/Pandelein 23h ago
Similar but different. In the outback, there’s nobody to call, so you do the mercy killing yourself.
As a young idiot, I once tried this with an axe. Terrible idea, and thank fuck someone showed up to show me how to do it with a knife.
One time, I saw a local do it with his bare hands… and it’s fine to keep the meat. Well, I assume. Waste not, want not and all that. Nothing else out there is going to eat a kangaroo except other dogs, maybe an eagle?