KANGAROO culling needed to be increased after fires to boost recovery of parks and farm, a veteran professional shooter said this week.
Newbridge’s Glenn Cole said calls to stop kangaroo culling in the Grampians after fire destroyed more than 70,000 hectares before Christmas were misguided.
“We actually need to cull more kangaroos, so when the burnt area of the National park and farm land starts to regrow, the plants will have a chance to re-establish without having Kangaroos and other animals eating the plants before they can get some size on them,” Mr Cole said.
“In farming practices, you would exclude stock from pastures So it can re-establish itself before stock are allowed to graze it.
“The kangaroos and feral animals that have survived the fire are now putting extra pressure on existing feed in non-burnt national park and farming land, thus causing over grazing, this impacts the farmers especially causing more pressure on them to feed their own livestock in a very dry year.”
Mr Cole claimed discussions with public land managers in the past five years had seen agreement that kangaroo numbers were too great for the forest and parks to handle, “forcing kangaroos onto private land”.  “The workers and managers are saying plants that should be 1.5 metres high are only 0.75- to one-metre-high owing to over grazing. This is one reason Parks Victoria do annual culls in the north-west parks of up to 4000 kangaroos,” he said.
“There are also many government departments that do annual culls of kangaroos on land they manage.
“As for people saying that there is small numbers of kangaroos in Victoria. Just go and ask any landowner/farmer for their observations.”
Mr Cole said he had lived near the Loddon River for 65 years.
“Where I spent my first 28 years, there were never any kangaroos on the east side of the Loddon River, and very few on the west side of the river (forest side). Now on the east side of the river there is in excess of 100 kangaroos around the small town I grew up in.
“Talking to the previous generation, they would talk of when the were little when a kangaroo was seen, it was very rare and special, the whole district would come to see it,” he said.
“My interest is to control the number of kangaroos and other wildlife that are out of control/over populated.
“Farmers spend hundreds of dollars per hectare to grow crops and feed for livestock only to have large numbers of kangaroos and other wildlife come in and destroy large parcels of crop and pastures.
“Farmers in my local area grow summer crops to feed their livestock over summer and autumn, only to have kangaroos coming in and eat the feed before they can feed it to their livestock - (normal farming practice is to destock a summer crop paddock to let the feed grow and bulk up then let livestock in to graze.
Mr Cole said culling and harvesting of kangaroos would give land time to recover for natural disasters. “Don’t give in to the latest calls that want to have a ban on culling. That will only place unnecessary stress on recovering land,” he said.