The 6 rules are:

• Know your animal
• Over harvesting should be difficult
• The harvest should be conservative
• Must be effective monitoring and enforcement
• Mistakes should cause little damage
• Locals should benefit

So how does the kangaroo harvest stacks up against these?

Rule 1, know your animal: A great deal is known about kangaroo's. It's unique position in the hearts and minds of Australians has ensured it has received considerable research attention. Their capacity to recover rapidly from drought is well documented, for example after the 1982-84 drought in NSW populations of eastern grey kangaroos which had declined by 72% increase by 233% over 2 years (Fletcher et al 1990). Work in Qld has shown that in areas of intensive long term harvest the juvenile survival rates for the population as a whole actually increases with increasing harvest effort. The population increases is recruitment rate to compensate for the harvest (Pople 1996). Even more remarkable are results with Tas Bennetts wallaby showing that under intensive harvest pressure females actually reach puberty earlier than they otherwise would (Driessen and Hocking 1992). Remarkable stuff! Kangaroos may be the perfect animal for a harvest industry because they are actually adapted to being harvested and responding to dramatic population crashes caused by droughts.

Rule 2, over harvesting should be difficult: The CSIRO in their submission to the Senate inquiry into wildlife utilisation a few years ago stated that "in the absence of a quota system it would probably be uneconomic to reduce kangaroo numbers to below 10/sq km , where as it is known kangaroos can recover after drought from densities as low as 2/sq km" (CSIRO 1997) The simple reason is that kangaroos aren’t whales and they are not Bengal tigers, a kangaroo carcass is worth to the harvester about $10-15 each so for a kangaroo harvester to make money he has to take at least 30 animals/night, any less and he losses money. Once numbers get below about 10/sq sq km a harvester simply can't take enough to pay the bills.

Rule no 3, harvest conservatively: All State kangaroo management plans set harvest quotas of no more than 10-15% of the total population. This has been demonstrated in population modeling exercises to be the maximum sustainable yield (Pople and Grigg 1999, Hacker et al 2000). Nationally the resultant quotas have rarely been met and we therefore can’t comment on actual ethicacy of this as a maximum sustainable yield, other than to reiterate the observation of many commentators that the long term harvest appears to have had no impact on populations (Choquenot et al 1998). However at the State level the red kangaroo quota in Queensland has been fully harvested for at least 15 years, with no apparent impact on populations (Pople 1996).