Rocky Pellegrino has been shooting kangaroos for the last 14 years in and around Broken Hill, an outback mining town in far-west New South Wales.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Listen Duration: 4 minutes 19 seconds 4 m 19 s Outback shooter exports homemade roo crumble ( Cherie von Hörchner ) Download 2 MB

Until recently, he would sell kangaroo corpses to processing plants, which would then transform the bounty into roo meat.

One year ago, Rocky decided to cut out the middle man.

Today, on a small block at the industrial end of town, his four-door dehydrator hums away, sucking the last drops of moisture from beds of mince.

The bad news for kangaroo connoisseurs is that Rocky's produce is literally going to the dogs.

"Ninety-nine per cent of what we do is dried dog treats," said Rocky, who sells tonnes of kangaroo meat to pet lovers in North America and China.

Rocky Pellegrino's roo pet food crumble is proving popular overseas. ( ABC: Cherie von Hörchner )

"We've just produced our own crumble of roo meat and it's really starting to take off.

"It's natural, healthy and good for dogs.

"We use no preservatives and no salts, no added ingredients — it's all natural."

The smell of dead roo — unmistakable to anyone who has cooked or worked with the animals — is overwhelming in Rocky's small work shed, where a team of three workers process a couple of hundred marsupials each week.

"At the moment we are only doing about 200," Rocky said.

"Once we get motivated a bit more, we could do 100 a day here easy — we could do 500 a week, not a problem."

Rocky says selling kangaroo meat is less wasteful than leaving dead roos in a paddock. ( Supplied: Darren Gall )

For those offended by the notion of Chinese pets eating Australia's national symbol, Rocky insists that, with culling a reality, selling the meat is less wasteful.

"There's plenty of kangaroos," he said.

"There are property owners with 'shoot-and-let-lie' tags and they just cull them and leave them; it's a real waste."

Rocky hoped one day to process meat through his plant for the domestic market.

"It would be nice; we could process goats and a few wild pigs," he said.

"The people in the town and the restaurants would love to buy local produce, but at the moment we're just concentrating on pet food.

"You've got to crawl before you can walk; a lot of guys keep telling me Rome wasn't built in a day."