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The officers found five adult kangaroos and one joey, or baby kangaroo, dead, according to a police statement issued Tuesday. A short time later, police were notified another seven kangaroos and one joey had been found dead in the nearby Maloney’s Beach area.
They also discovered an injured joey, which was taken into the care of animal rescue volunteers.
Following investigations and a public appeal for information, officers arrested two 17-year-olds on Monday. The pair will appear in a children’s court in November on charges of recklessly beating and killing animals.
Animal welfare volunteers were distraught by the incident, which occurred in an area where kangaroos regularly gather at dusk on a grassy reserve that runs alongside a tranquil stretch of golden sand.
The kangaroos “would have been in total fear,” Janelle Renes, chair of a local branch of Wildlife Information, Rescue and Education Service (Wires) told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. “To think of the horror they would have gone through.”
Volunteers are caring for the surviving joey, whom they have named “Hope.” She is doing well, according to a Wires spokesman, and has been “buddied up” with another orphaned joey, Hopper, ahead of their eventual return to the wild.
The incident comes as New South Wales lawmakers are due to release the findings of a bipartisan inquiry into the health and well-being of kangaroos and other macropods in the state following devastating wildfires in late 2019 and early 2020. Nearly 3 billion animals were killed or displaced during the fires, scientists have estimated, including 5 million kangaroos and wallabies.
Animal rights groups are worried climate change, drought, wildfires and the diversion and depletion of water sources for agriculture, mining and urban development could raise the risk of localized extinction of some macropod species. They’re also concerned about the impact on kangaroo populations of commercial and non-commercial killing. Most Australian states allow kangaroos to be commercially culled or managed as a pest.
Officials say culls are necessary for the welfare of kangaroo populations and the protection of people and biodiversity as farming brings new water sources to Australia’s arid interior, causing the kangaroo population to surge during rainy seasons and collapse in droughts. Animal rights activists in Australia and the United States have described Australia’s kangaroo cull as “ten times larger and far bloodier than the notorious seal slaughter in Canada” and have campaigned to ban the kangaroo trade in the United States.
The latest incident is not the first case of animal cruelty involving Australia’s iconic animals. A New South Wales man was sentenced to 20 months imprisonment last year for encouraging a friend to mow down 21 eastern gray kangaroos with his truck at a local beach.
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