They bounce across the roof of Parliament House. They collide with cars. They come in through the bedroom window. Canberra, Australia's capital, has a problem-too many kangaroos.
Authorities have tried giving them vasectomies and oral contraceptives, to no avail. They say trucking them to new and distant pastures is too expensive. Now they're proposing a cull. But many people are aghast at the idea of their best-known marsupial being shot en masse in the national capital.
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Kangaroos are getting too close for comfort in Australia's capital Canberra, as seen above at the Belconnen Naval Transmission Station. They bounce across the roof of Parliament House and even through house windows.[Photo Source: Shanghai Daily/Mark Graham] |
A government survey has found that more than 80 percent of Canberra residents think the wild kangaroos should stay. On the other hand, in a different survey, 17 percent of drivers in the district reported colliding with a kangaroo at least once.
Canberra's latest man-v-roo horror story concerns a confused beast, standing about 1.75 meters high on its powerful hind legs, which last month bounded through a closed bedroom window onto a bed where a couple huddled with their nine-year-old daughter, then hopped into their 10-year-old son's bedroom.
The animal was wrestled out of the house by the father, Beat Ettlin, and headed for the hills, leaving claw marks on a bed and a trail of blood from broken glass.
Maxine Cooper, envir-onment commissioner for the government of the Australian Capital Territory, says humans aren't the only ones at risk - the kangaroos are destroying the grassy native habitat of endangered species such as a 15-centimeter-long lizard known as the earless dragon.
But "compare that to anything furry with big eyes - the human emotions generally respond to furriness and big eyes," Cooper said.
(Shanghai Daily April 20,2009)
