Dear Crikey

Ever since I did a zoology degree at ANU (which specialises in parasite ecology) I've been wondering about risk profile of wild game meat like kangaroo. Milo Dunphy founder of the Total Environment Centre and a keen hunter in his younger days was against kangaroo as a general food source for this very reason.

The kangaroo meat industry [in our view do not] convincingly address the inevitable, dangerous parasite load in kangaroos unlike farmed animals subject to the usual chemical treatments. Recently on talkback on abc Sydney radio an industry representative [stated] on air ... kangaroos only have worms in the gut not hydatid cysts in the meat. [It seems] hydatid is a seriously under estimated issue, which apparently has gone off the radar. Yet 80 or 90 Australians per year suffer potentially catastrophic consequences of infection via farm dogs getting at wild kangaroos and other infection pathways.

Nor does it help to refer to Indigenous consumption for thousands of years. My advice is traditional folks of the central desert cook the kangaroo meat almost to charcoal to feel safe about eating it. Not exactly your gourmet experience. And we shoot for a much longer life span today.

This report from ABC Landline in 2005, Tapeworm continues to thrive in wild dog population, Reporter: Joanne Shoebridge, First Published: 23/10/2005, http://www.abc.net.au/landline/content/2005/s1486396.htm is a very frightening traverse of hydatid parasites in wild dogs and farm dogs feeding on kangaroo and wallaby carcass, the same kangaroos shot for supermarkets. Crunching into a hydatid in a kangaroo steak could the worst dining experience of your whole life.

The industry says they do inspections under the regulations but the point is farming and chemical treatment to avoid parasites is a far superior prophylactic for high volume food supply which is just not possible in wild kangaroo.

Here is a mild extract of Landline, and think carefully about eating wild meat:

JOANNE SHOEBRIDGE: When he does catch a wild dog, Mark Goullet euthanases them and sends their intestines to the Canberra laboratory of Dr David Jenkins. So far, two in every five dogs tested have been heavily infected with hydatids.

DR DAVID JENKINS: "We are interested from the point of view of, "Are they spreading hydatids in these urban areas?" And the short answer is, "Yes, they are." This is the gut of the dingo or the wild dog in which we're hoping to find tapeworms. And the tapeworms produce the eggs, which then get eaten by a sheep, and each of these cysts represent an egg that the sheep has eaten.

JOANNE SHOEBRIDGE: So you don't get cysts in dogs, you do get cysts in animals like sheep.

DR DAVID JENKINS: That's right. No cysts in dogs. Cysts in sheep, kangaroos, wallabies, but really importantly, this is exactly what happens in people. They don't normally get as many cysts as this, but they will be much, much bigger - maybe 1, 2, 3 litres capacity.

JOANNE SHOEBRIDGE: These dogs, too, are riddled with tapeworms. Hydatid disease is no longer notifiable in most states, which means health authorities have few statistics. David Jenkins has to resort to trawling through the records of individual hospitals to track the incidence of hydatids, which is often poorly diagnosed and recorded.

JOANNE SHOEBRIDGE: Do you think this is a disease that has largely slipped off the radar?

DR DAVID JENKINS: Oh, I'm absolutely sure of it, and not just in the medical profession, in the veterinary profession as well. We get 80 to 100 new cases a year, which in the scheme of things, is not a lot of patients, but nevertheless, for those people who are infected, it can be catastrophic. They can lose a lung, they can lose a whole lobe of the liver. It can take several years to get a diagnosis if the doctor is not really switched on to looking for hydatids, the patient can get progressively more unwell. "

And it doesn't stop there. The prevalence of wild dogs seems to be growing and the exposure of bushwalkers to attack and infection by hydatid that way via bites is also a real one: 7.30 Report - 16/04/2002: Wild dogs eat graziers out of business

Tom McLoughlin, ecology action sydney

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[Extract of Crikey ezine 14th May 2007 here:]

Kangaroos, methane, etc:

Tim Thomas writes: Geoff Russell's comments contained several errors (Friday, comments). Kangaroos are more efficient at producing meat than sheep. True, kangaroos are not ruminants, but nevertheless efficiently ferment cellulose in their foregut. Some but, not all kangaroo species, are less efficient than sheep in processing dry feed, but make up for this by having a much lower basal metabolic rate as discussed here. In addition, kangaroos have a higher muscle to body weight ratio than sheep, discussed here, and although farming kangaroos is impractical, and in my opinion undesirable, that is not the question. If (wild) kangaroo meat is available in your supermarket, as it is in mine, then eating it lowers your contribution to atmospheric greenhouse gases. Roo shooting might not be much fun but then farming is also full of tough, unpleasant work. There is nothing more boring than preparing the ground for broad acre cropping, which includes the risk of lung damage from dust as well as exposure to a variety of chemicals, among other dangers. On all counts replacing, at least partially, ruminant meat with macropod meat would be environmentally beneficial. As to the efficiency of ruminant digestion it is interesting to note that the production of methane represents a loss of about 25% of the energy present in the animal's feed.

[Friday 11th May 07 crikey ezine]Kangaroos and methane:

Animal Liberation committee member Geoff Russell writes: Andrew Dempster (yesterday, comments) asks if kangaroos produce methane, and if not, why we can't use them instead of sheep and cattle. Kangaroos don't produce methane because of some tricky digestive processes. But they aren't very efficient in producing meat. Ruminants ruminate! This enables them to extract more energy from good pasture than kangaroos which pass food through quickly and relatively inefficiently. The kangaroo digestive mechanism is better on bad pasture, they take in and process a lot of food, while sheep and cattle face a digestive bottleneck. See Knox's "Biology" (the standard University biology text) for more detail. The bottom line here is that kangaroos aren't efficient meat producers, they don't herd, they fight, they jump fences, the mob structure isn't good for farming, and no farmer wants to give up cushy evenings watching Big Brother to go out and shoot kangaroos which is a tough, back breaking and thoroughly unpleasant job. The current kangaroo industry can't get enough shooters to even meet its current quotas which produces very little meat. Read Jared Diamond's "Guns Germs and Steel". He explains in detail why so few wild animal species have been domesticated over the millenia - it isn't for lack of trying. And if you can't domesticate them, you have to hunt them. Hunting wild animals has never and can never support large populations. Again, see Diamond for more details.

Dr Peter Wood writes: In response to Andrew Dempster's question, kangaroos produce a negligible amount of methane: Kempton et al, Methane production and digestibility measurements in the grey kangaroo and sheep. Aust J Biol Sci. 1976 Jul; 29(3): pp 209-14. (Abstract here).

Postscript #1. This important public health debate goes on in the pages of crikey.com.au ezine below, with clarification here of the life cycle indirect danger of hydatid via dog vectors, but also other systems risk of wild versus agricultural meat supply: