Not For Vegetarians

Well I braced myself and went out shooting our national emblem with Duncan last night to see first hand what it's like. I will spare everyone the gory details, but the main thing is that it is a hell of a lot more humane than what our supermarket meat goes through before we eat it. It certainly wasn't "fun", but it did not upset me as much as I thought it would. We got 3 roos - Duncan is an astonishing shot and dropped each one stone dead with one shot each.

Everyone asks me "what about if you shoot a doe with a joey?"  The answer is that you probably don't really want to know, but the humane culling laws (!) require that you kill them immediately and "painlessly". You try not to take a doe with a visible joey, but at night it's impossible to tell, so if you drop a doe you have to check the pouch and kill the joey straight away.

My job for the night was to be the spotter, holding one of the spotlighting torches as we drove slowly through the Wooramel Station riverside plains. When you see a roo, you tap the shooter on the arm and hold your spotlight on the animal. I did this while sending out telepathic roo messages ("Run! Run for your life!"). They will sit up and look at you for up to ten seconds before bouncing off, so the shooter has to be quick to line up and take the shot. The law requires a single head shot. I couldn't believe Duncan's accuracy.

Because there is so much grass for them now after all the rain, the roos were spread out all over the property and hard to spot, so after our 3 we called it a night and Duncan set up an oil can for me to try some target practice. Turns out I'm a bit of a crack shot myself. I used a .222 rifle; it has a sight scope and not much recoil. You shoot from inside the ute, resting the gun on a mount which is hooked over the side of the door, with one elbow on the dashboard while your spotter holds the light on your target. It was an interesting experience and we have plenty of meat for the freezer now, but it's not something that sits easy in my mind.

Honey and Smokey are not bothered at all and are keenly waiting by the roo cooler for the meat preparation to begin!