When an indigenous man, like Tony Armstrong, one of the biggest stars of the ABC infotainment universe, headlines a TV program called “Eat the Invaders” (ETI), the subtext hits you (if you are a white Australian) in the face like the punch of a young Mike Tyson. You have to admire anybody who can combine a three- word slogan with a double entendre.
But the program isn’t about eating people, it’s about eating the animals that the invaders brought with them. I guess rats arrived thanks to their own ingenuity at stowing away on ships, but the rest, like rabbits, foxes, and cane toads, or sheep and cattle, were very thoughtfully and deliberately brought here and released or farmed. The first episode of Armstrong’s show is about rabbits; but the episode listing of ETI on ABC iView has him munching on moggies in episode 5.
Gary Twyford, long time Department of Primary Industries Officer wrote a thoughtful book about our introduced animals and plants back in 1991 “Australia’s Introduced Animals and Plants”. He describes one of the early attempts at eradicated rabbits … by breeding cats and depositing them in rabbit boroughs. You’d have to expect that to be more effective than adding rabbits to the menu; but it turned one problem into two.
Twyford also lays out the mechanism by which rabbits colonised the country; also missed by ETI.
They followed the sheep.
Sheep, cloven hoofed invaders
If you want to talk about environmental disasters, you can’t ignore sheep; but I’ll bet Sydney to a pile of cattle dung that ETI doesn’t mention the sheep.
Of course, the people who study this stuff for real, as opposed to ABC infotainment producers, don’t ignore sheep. A 2001 study by a NPWS researcher with the teasing title: “Causes of the extinction of native mammals of the western division of new south wales: an ecological interpretation of the nineteenth century historical record” noted that there were 100 million sheep in Australia by 1890. Clearing for sheep helped rabbits to spread. Lunney considers the views of others about rabbits and overgrazing, but concludes:
“The impact of ever-increasing millions of sheep on all frontages, through all the refuges. and across all the landscape by the mid 1880s, is the primary cause of the greatest period of mammal extinction in Australia in modern times.”
Clearing in Australia and globally
The patent on dynamite was awarded to Alfred Nobel in 1867 and the new invention received a warm welcome in Australia. Just two decades later and Australia was consuming fully half the dynamite used in the British Empire to destroy millions of hectares of forest. It has never been loggers who were the major destroyers of the world’s forests, logging is bloody hard work. A peasant farmer might clear a couple of hectares of forest in a year to plant crops and some of that will be sold for logging, but the weapon of choice by those destroying forests as I speak is the humble match. Just set it alight. It’s a method that has worked wonders in Indonesia and Brazil. But in Australia, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the weapon of choice was dynamite. Ringbarking was cheaper and widely practiced, but not half as much fun as blowing stuff up. The clearing helped the sheep and the sheep helped the rabbits. As Twyford says:
“Sheep made a considerable contribution to the spread of rabbits in Australia, as the sheep’s habit of close grazing made the feed the ideal length for the rabbits to eat. … [rabbits] were grazing everywhere, opening up country that would have been unsuitable for rabbits before the sheep arrived.”
I wonder if ETI has noticed that sheep are already on the menu; but it hasn’t done much to control their numbers. That’s a bit of a hint that biodiversity and conservation isn’t a driving force behind ETI. Environmentalism is like that in Australia. Anything which interferes with the traditional Aussie BBQ is off the menu; literally and metaphorically.
Virulent viruses
When cats didn’t control or eliminate the rabbit problem, it was decided to infect them with a cruel and painful disease, the myxoma virus. Calicivirus followed; not as painful perhaps, but the rabbits may disagree.
The fact that two virulent and deadly viruses failed to eliminate rabbits should tell you everything you need to know about the prospects of removing a species by catching, killing and eating individuals.
Feeding people
ETI is a catchy slogan, but its irrelevance to Australia’s environmental problems is complete.
Think about it for 30 seconds and you are left wondering what the ETI crew think Australians (both indigenous and non-indigenous) have been eating for the past couple of hundred years? With minor exceptions, invader species have been the mainstay of all our diets. Or have wheat, rice, potatoes, capsicum, tomatoes, peas, soybeans, oats, corn, broccoli, spinach, sheep, cattle, pigs and chickens all been naturalised in ceremonies I slept through?
People who praise bush tucker need to ask why exactly everybody, on every continent on the planet, eschews bush tucker for introduced or highly modified plants and animals?
I remember a guided tour in the Gammon Ranges decades ago when an indigenous woman pointed out all manner of bush tucker. When asked what one particular rare and prized plant tasted like, she said “spinach”. Now, I quite like spinach, but I’m not keen on the idea of spending a couple of hours walking to perhaps get (or not get) a helping of spinach from a patch that might (or might not) have emerged after a particular weather event.
Stalwart lovers of killing things have been predicting a kangaroo industry explosion for decades. But nobody likes the meat, or the offal, or even the tails; despite a few people remembering a dish that their great aunt made one year when they were a child that they can’t remember as tasting foul. Why else would this pathetic excuse for an industry need to export the little it produces overseas to markets of hundreds of millions? If Aussies loved kangaroo meat, they’d have wiped the animal off the face of the planet decades ago.
The kangaroo industry survives by constantly finding people who’ve never eaten it. If there was any repeat business in the countries who import the stuff, it would have boomed decades ago.
But Australians don’t eat kangaroos like chickens … firstly because they don’t like it and secondly because it’s not possible.
Driving around the bush in the middle of the night shooting critters isn’t high on anybody’s bucket list, not even for one night, let alone 5 nights a week. It’s lonely, hard, filthy, and smelly. It doesn’t even pay well. It’s also pretty distressing. Beating a joey’s brains out on a bullbar might be a quick way of killing said joey, assuming you can find it after killing mum, but does anybody enjoy it?
Climate change will make a cruel, inefficient and stupid industry even less likely to succeed. Have you ever talked to a shooter about their petrol/diesel bills? I have. A shooter told me he shot the first 30 roos on any night just to pay for the Toyota fuel and maintenance. What about EVs? Have you ever seen a roo shooter with an electric vehicle (EV)? They are too bloody heavy. If you want a tricky problem to solve, try pulling/winching an electric F150 from a bog. Suddenly having 800 kg of battery isn’t looking too attractive.
Gathering and hunting has mostly vanished as a food source globally for incredibly sensible reasons. It gives very little bang for buck. But it’s terrific for launching slogans, making docos and polishing the ABC Influencer brand. If you are serious about conservation, ETI isn’t, then you promote a diet which trashes the smallest amount of land and other resources; ie., you are vegan.
No one is going to domesticate cane toads and produce them at scale and a few boutique businesses based on selling them to provide treats for the jaded palates of the rich isn’t going to solve any feral animal problem.
What will this TV program do? It will at most, inspire a wave of ABC viewers to add the odd slogan about eating invaders into dinner party patter. There will be a little more bragging by some about the time they ate rabbit or camel stew on their last holiday in the NT. Or the one they paid $175/person to eat at MONA's Faro restaurant. At that bargain price, I can see rabbits quickly fading into a distant memory.
Killing wildlife will become cool in such circles, especially among those who’ve never done it. Some will figure they’d like to get closer to nature, introduced or otherwise. This will be an incentive to get an even bigger SUV and all the winches and gear that goes with it. You can see these monsters dotted around suburban Australia, feeding off the outback glamour doco genre, gleaming in the sunlight without a trace of red or any other kind of dust.
Meanwhile everybody’s grocery shopping will remain, as always, composed of an assortment of plants and animals bred and refined over a thousand years for being able to be produced efficiently (some very much more efficiently than others) at scale. These are, of course, all invaders.
Romanticism
I'm always amazed when somebody looks achingly into a camera lens and waxes lyrical about some totally trivial "lost art"; like cooking a rabbit. Rabbits of various kinds are found in most parts of the world. Is Australia the only country where people have solved the devilishly difficult problem of cooking them so that they taste okay? Are other countries desperately seeking the intellectual property involved and anxious to pay royalties for the various patents that reveal the secrets?
There's an enlightening example in Ed Conway's "Material World" about the Chinese quest to make a satisfactory ballpoint pen. It started at the World Economic Forum in 2015 in Switzerland, decades after China commissioned its first nuclear power plant. Premier Li Keqiang noticed that the pen he was given was beautifully smooth to write with. Despite making most of the world's ballpoint pens, when China was making the high quality versions, they used imported ball and socket parts from Japan, Germany, or Switzerland. I won't spoil the story in case you want to read the book; suffice to say it took them around 5 years to work it out. The point is that there are some astonishing, difficult and complex skills in our world, and there is stuff so mind-numbingly simple that the only people who think it is a "lost art" are people who know zero about the real skills that hide in plain sight all around them. Like the cameras used to make ETI. For example, Nikon has over 20,000 patents.
Enter the science
Almost at the end of the first Episode, Armstrong suddenly revealed the truth. After all the lying and deception of the promos and talk of eradicating rabbits with a CWA magic recipe, Armstrong looks up from his gourmet rabbit whatever and intones:
“We can’t eat our way out of this problem … so we are going to need science to do its bit and hopefully save us”.
Armstrong had interviewed a couple of scientists who mentioned gene drives, but there was nothing about the details and the problems.
All the air time which could have been devoted to explaining and analysing that science had been wasted having a good time at exotic locations with (mostly) beautiful people. When a politician claims a travel expense that was unrelated to their job, the ABC would scream corruption, but journalists bulking up reasonably vacuous programs by visiting picturesque locations (while ignoring serious issues of substance)? Nah, nothing to see here.
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