OPPONENTS of the ACT government’s annual kangaroo cull say the announced number of animals killed this year is wrong.

Yesterday the government opened all reserve sites and unleased lands closed since May 7 after culling what Daniel Iglesias, director of Parks and Conservation said was a total of 3253 kangaroos “as part of the ACT government’s ongoing program to protect these grassland and woodland sites from overgrazing.”

Of these, 1822 were culled within the ACT and 1431 were culled at Googong Foreshores in NSW, he said. And the cull was undertaken without incident.

However, Robyn Soxsmith, of the Animal Protectors Alliance, says the government is “lying” and over-stating the numbers.

“It would be nice to think Canberra was still home to over 3200 kangaroos after nine years of unremitting slaughter at a kill rate four times faster than the maximum rate at which kangaroo populations can grow.

“But those of us who spend much of our lives around ACT reserves know that it is simply impossible.

“In fact, the slaughter this year seems to have been nowhere near as intense as in previous years. Our watchers around the reserves heard only a few shots fired. One of the usual dead giveaways that shooting has occurred are the orphaned at-foot joeys lining the streets around the reserves. We saw few of these this year.”

She said the government is falsely claiming that it has killed thousands of kangaroos when it has probably killed at most a few hundred.

“The government is simply keeping up appearances to give Canberrans the impression that killing kangaroos is normal and business as usual,” she said.

“Every year they lie when they claim they do it for environmental reasons. Every year they lie when they claim the killing is humane.

“They want to mislead the public into believing the kangaroo population can sustain what is clearly an unsustainable killing rate, so that they can get away with killing kangaroos any time and for any reason they want – for example every time they want to ram a new development up to the fences of a reserve, which they seem to be doing quite routinely since the annual massacre began.”