From dusk to dawn: A night in the life of a roo shooter

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It's the dead of night. The middle of a stubbly paddock. Just you and the motor running, the eyes gleaming in the spotlight. This is kangaroo hunting.

GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING This first of two perspectives from the frontlines of kangaroo management includes imagery and descriptions some may find distressing.

Five minutes. That's how long it takes Glenn Cole to gut a roo in the light of a headlamp.

The head comes off first.

The hind and front legs are docked. A swift, methodical rhythm.

Cole wields the steel cable cutters in a business-like fashion. Hopper choppers they're called in the trade, though it's not much in the way of a euphemism.

The tail he saws off with a paring knife, tosses it onto the tray of the ute. He'll keep a few for the dogs to gnaw on.

Viscera tumble out, steaming in the cold air. With a boot, Cole sweeps the glistening purply lumps into the darkness.

The arc of light momentarily catches dark blood spattered across the gum leaves at his feet. Cole cops a faceful, wipes his glasses with a cloth.

"It happens," he says, and carries on.

He's been kicked in the stomach before, a big buck's nerves still twitching as he hoisted the animal up for butchering. Even a dead roo will give you a decent bruise.

The truck's orange strip lighting lends things a strange festive feel. As though Cole could just as easily be driving a food truck selling pies instead of this mobile abattoir.

It's a scene made more surreal by the talkback radio that trickles from the dash, more or less audible as the wind gusts and subsides.

"What fish is also a hairstyle?" asks the announcer as insomniacs and night-shifters ring in to play the quiz.

"Mullet!" calls Cole, flinging a head into the paddock, chuckling as the callers get it wrong.

"Which 10-letter word means smuggled or bootlegged goods?"

"Contraband!" cries Cole.

Thunk go some innards on the ground.

Once four more carcasses are butchered and slung up, it's time for a break. Cole pours coffee from a thermos and bites into a sandwich, standing amongst the roo guts to eat his ham and cheese.

He's a man at ease in this setting.

Cole was 11 when he first picked up a gun. His dad taught him to shoot. Father and son would go ferreting, Cole skinning and gutting his own rabbits. As a 14-year-old he used to hop off the bus and wait for the driver to finish his route and double back, pick him up and go fox hunting. Cole romanced his now-wife by taking her spotlighting. The young lovers once flattened the battery hunting on her parents' place, had to hike home through four kilometres of rugged country.

He takes pleasure in the marksmanship. In shooting he's found something he's good at. Expert.

"Blood doesn't bother me one little bit. Unless it's mine."

Of course it doesn't.

A hydraulic mechanic by trade, Cole has worked on farms all his life, slaughtering his own livestock. In the country you understand your place in the food chain and what it takes to put food on the table. You don't mourn the death of your dinner.

"I know that I am going to do it properly. One shot, one kill."

Kangaroos are harvested commercially in six Australian states in a $300 million trade in skins and meat for human and pet consumption.

By far the most roos are killed for profit in Queensland, followed by New South Wales.

In Victoria, though, it's a fledgling industry where the native animals are only commercially shot as part of a trial, for pet meat.

Which means the majority of Victorian roos are killed as pests on farmland, by non-professional shooters who must hold a gun licence and are encouraged to adhere to ethical standards, but are not required to undergo training or attain any level of accuracy.

"Last year probably 100,000 roos in Victoria were shot by non-professional people so there's no control on anything. That's why the animal libbers get up in arms and I don't blame them for that."

Cole has zero tolerance for unethical shooting.

"Nephew came out with me one night and he wasn't shooting them properly and I told him to put his gun away and not to bother shooting for the rest of the night. He didn't take kindly to it but he now appreciates what I taught him. He realises being shot in the head and killed instantly is better than being shot in the gut and left to suffer.

"I know of blokes who do it and they just don't care. You hear of people gut shooting roos so they'll go and die somewhere else, not on their place. That's not on, in my opinion.

"Unfortunately we can't catch 'em doing it, it can't be proved. That's one reason I believe if we got a professional industry going in Victoria, we're going to try to eliminate that stuff."

Roos can be thick on the ground out here.

One night, over a one-kilometre stretch in north-central Victoria, Cole estimates he saw more than 250. It wasn't always so.

"When I first started shooting, if I shot a roo in Victoria I was rapt. If you saw one you were rapt.

"It's changed in my lifetime. Where there were no roos in the small town I grew up in, now there's a mob of 100."

He's hitting on a contentious topic. Roo numbers fluctuate with the seasons, affected by drought. Whether the animals are 'in plague proportions' or at risk of being eradicated in certain areas can depend on who you ask and how you interpret the available data.

The most recent aerial surveys relied upon by governments estimate the kangaroo population Australia-wide at more than 41 million. More than a million of those are shot each year commercially. Upwards of another half a million are killed by farmers and in culls on public land.

Cole regards what he does as pest management, points out a damaged fence as proof.

"The term is 'kangaroo harvester'. But yes, we only manage them because they have become a pest.

"I like 'em. I reckon they're a quite magnificent animal. It's just a job that's got to be done."

This night most of the roos are killed with a single shot at 200 metres. Textbook. But a few times, as the truck pulls up beside the downed animal, it's clear it's still alive.

This buck takes two shots to the head before Cole is satisfied. "That's life," he sighs, disappointed in himself for a less-than-perfect shot.

To kill a roo with one bullet, you have to hit what is a 70-millimetre target, the brain. At night. From a distance. Even a marksman as sharp as Cole, and as professional, can't do it every time.

He remembers once having to chase a roo that wouldn't die.

"Normally they're in that much pain that they stay down, but this one just kept going."

Cole tries to avoid shooting females, as is the current practice amongst most commercial hunters according to the Kangaroo Industry Association — though that policy is under review. He looks for the bulkiness in their undercarriage denoting a joey in the pouch. Sometimes his gun is raised before he sees a second set of eyes blinking back at him.

Cole did the analysis once, found he takes two bucks for every doe.

"To make it profitable you try to go for the bigger ones. Females only get to about 35 kilos. One time I shot a buck that was 92.5 kilos."

Only once tonight does he shoot a doe.

Rounding on her body, he jumps out. In a single motion, he reaches into the pouch, pulls out the joey, smashes its head against the side of the ute and flicks it into the field. This is in line with the code of conduct for shooters, which prescribes euthanasia of joeys by a blow to the skull or decapitation with a sharp blade.

From the truck, Cole spots a second youngster lingering nearby, suddenly motherless. It has to be shot — this is ethical hunting. Too small to be worth butchering, the body is left where it falls. These joeys, in-pouch and at-foot, are not counted in the official numbers killed. Collateral deaths.

"That's life," comes the refrain.

"At least it won't starve to death now."

Unlike stalking deer in daylight, with roos there is little creeping up on your prey.

The ute trundles through the paddocks, bumping over the stubble that used to be oats, barley, wheat, canola. The axles creak and jolt on the rough ground. An earplug in his right ear, Cole keeps one hand on the wheel, one on the spotlight. He's seen most of this terrain only in maps, but drives like it's broad daylight.

The 58-year-old has become nocturnal like the roos.

It's the light that stops them in their tracks. As long as they look away they keep moving. Especially tonight. It's windy and the mobs are restless. But if they look at the beam they hesitate, peer back.

"Come on, sit, sit," mutters Cole as he tracks a small group. "Are you gonna sit?"

Only once do his eyes falter, the grey-coated roos shifting like ghosts against the scrub. It's getting late, so late it's early.

It feels as though we're turning circles in the same interminable paddock all night, a disorienting game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Cole seems to climb out to open and close the same gate a hundred times. In truth, there have been maybe 50 gates on three different properties. Not once do we see the lights of a farmhouse. These are vast landholdings, detached from human habitation.

Under a fingernail moon, Cole could be the only man alive. We pass the decayed carcass of a roo he shot earlier in the season but left behind due to poor condition. Now, an ephemeral landmark. Cole is a night watchman of sorts, a patrolling presence in the landscape. He's disturbed sheep rustlers, shot dogs for worrying farmers' flocks.

Foxes he'll take if he can. Cuts off the ears to turn in for a $10 bounty.

It's a hand-to-mouth existence.

Roo meat fetches 75 cents a kilo. With an average weight of 25 kilos, Cole is making about $18 per roo. In a year of shooting for the Victorian pet meat trial, he's made $20,000.

He survives on his wife's nursing salary and intermittent farmhand jobs.

Even though it's more work to butcher the roos than leave them in the fields under the 'drop permits' issued to farmers wanting to remove roos as pests, Cole prefers shooting for the pet meat trial.

"This way I'm getting reimbursed and the meat is not getting wasted."

It's 5am before Cole is heaving carcasses into the cool room, hosing down his rig. Back-breaking work, even with the winch. There's a standing fortnightly appointment with the chiropractor.

The smell inside the refrigerated container is something Cole can't put his finger on to describe. It was enough to make a mate, who'd thought he might have a go at roo shooting, dry retch.

Cole has come home with 16 roos, a disappointing tally. He shot two more, but couldn't find them to retrieve. He'd climbed onto the tray, looked through the monocle that uses thermal imaging to detect body heat, but no good.

Sometimes Cole's too buggered to do more than peel off the bloodied overalls and fall onto the couch in his clothes. But tonight he makes a cup of tea and stands in the kitchen, newspaper spread on the counter.

His finger rests on a headline: 'Shoot a buck, can't make one'. About roo shooting in New South Wales. It rings true. Cole knows of areas that used to have five or six shooters, where now there's one. If it's a dying trade, he reckons, it's not because there's any shortage of the animal.

He'll be asleep in a few hours and out again tonight, like the roos.

There is no hint of light in the sky as he walks me to the car.

"Watch out for roos on the road," he calls, by way of goodbye.

Topics: animal-welfare, law-crime-and-justice, animals, human-interest, science-and-technology, animal-science, community-and-society, rural, sustainable-and-alternative-farming, environment, environmental-management, bendigo-3550, melbourne-3000, vic

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