Kangaroo dog treats the sustainable option, and their history
Spoiler – Real kangaroo dog treats, come from real kangaroos.
They are just not a name given to a kangaroo shaped biscuit full of wheat.
If you are a vegetarian or vegan, you might need to look away. Even in Australia, the country where this is a natural resource, some dog owners who are vegetarians and are squeamish over eating an animal variously called the national symbol (along with the emu), will buy kangaroo for their dog, because they know of its amazing benefits.
But there are reasons why Kangaroos are one of the best meats out their for humans and their dogs, and reasons why they are given a culling quota by the government science organisation.
Unlike many species that are endangered or struggling with habitat destruction, kangaroos have long been considered by Government agencies to be over – populated. In some locations, an actual pest.
These animals are typically wild strong native animals that are not found on any other continent. But with the expansion of farms, particularly in the state of Queensland, these animals have thrived beyond their pre-industrial age numbers.
As vegetable food times became good, and rains continued to provide plenty of food, and farms provided more food on the outskirts of towns, kangaroo numbers boomed.
Kangaroos are herbivores, and don’t provide a risk to humans or other animals as far as being a predator, but when they are over populated, they consume a lot more food than they normally would, which can reduce food stocks for all other species.
It also means that during drought times, which can last years, the young and the old kangaroos suffer and die in greater numbers than they would if they had sustainable herd numbers.
For this reason, CSIRO (a commonwealth government science agency) has calculated on a yearly basis what a healthy population goal should be, and provided quotas of specific sub species to be culled to reach those numbers. On herds of over 30 million kangaroos, the culling values have historically been around 1 million kangaroos (of specific sub species).
That might seem a lot, but the issue has long been that culling is so manually intensive and arduous that rarely does one third of the total cull quota ever get fulfilled.
The most humane process of culling has been to employ expert shooters to live in dusty hot outback conditions for months at a time, hunting roos. They are allocated tags for each kangaroo they kill, and redeem these tags, so that the agencies know how many are culled from each region of the country. The fee provided for each tag isn’t large, so it takes a lot of skill and effort for these shooters to make a reasonable wage, and keep the herd healthy.
Given this process, you might understand how achieving the desired culling numbers is rarely achieved anywhere near 50% of what is required to keep a healthy herd.
Where do kangaroo dog treats come into this process.
Kangaroos being a wild animal, has a particularly ‘gamey’ taste. For people raised on beef and farmed animals, this lean meat can be an acquired taste. Roo steaks are not available at every restaurant, and being a multi-cultural society, ethnic food rarely includes kangaroo meat in their recipes.
So even with this meat being one of the cleanest organic perfect protein rich foods in the world, the human taste and demand is not keeping up with the supply.
Rather than use the meat for low value products like fertilizers or landfill, it has entered the dog food and dog treat chain. And while it’s the perfect meat for dogs too, there just isn’t enough of a demand from these chains too, to increase demand, or the cull numbers. And for animal rights groups, that probably sounds like a good thing. Enen if not enough roos are being culled to keep the herd as healthy as it should be.
I personally run a healthy dog treats store in Australia, and kangaroo provides one of our widest range of options. We don’t like to waste anything, but owners are set in their ways, and so usually opt for farmed animals.
Even though kangaroos are highly sustainable, and don’t actually include farming or growing animals specifically for the human or dog plate, is still often resisted by some dog owners.
It is perhaps a case of long-term education. But if you wanted to have one of the leanest cleanest healthy dog treats available to dogs, then kangaroo should be the top of your list, it literally ticks every box.
