Understanding the background of shooting and hunting.

Across Australia, many animals are routinely shot and killed. Some in the name of ‘recreation’, others whose habitat has been destroyed for grazing pasture, and those who have, through no choice of their own, been introduced by humans to a country they weren’t native to.

Some native animals are stripped of their protections to allow for recreational and commercial killing, while the killing of non-natives is deemed ‘open slather’ for hunters. But whether these animals are native wildlife or other species, they all have the capacity to suffer, and many do as a result of often poorly regulated industries and a lack of laws to protect them from shooting cruelty.

Many people are shocked to learn that kangaroos aren’t the only native animals who can be shot and killed – either for commercial reasons or because they are deemed to be a ‘pest’ by land managers who share their habitat.

Every year, private landowners legally kill hundreds of thousands of native animals including wombats, sulphur-crested cockatoos, lorikeets, galahs, flying foxes, kangaroos, wallaroos and brushtail possums. Even kookaburras — Australia’s ‘king of the jungle’ — can be killed under permit schemes handed out by state governments across Australia.

You can take action here to speak out against the government-approved killing of these iconic species.