Australian capital’s pouch runneth over

They bounce across the roof of Parliament House. They collide with cars. They come in through the bedroom window.

Canberra, Australia’s capital, has a problem: too many kangaroos.

Authorities have tried giving them vasectomies and oral contraceptives, to no avail. They say trucking them to new and distant pastures is too expensive. Now they’re proposing a cull. But many people are aghast at the idea of their best-known marsupial being shot en masse in the national capital.

A government survey has found that more than 80% of Canberra residents think the wild kangaroos should stay.

On the other hand, in a different survey, 17% of drivers in the district reported having collided with a kangaroo at least once.

Canberra’s latest man-versus-roo horror story concerns a confused beast, standing about 5 feet 9 inches on its powerful hind legs, that last month bounded through a closed bedroom window onto a bed containing a couple and their 9-year-old daughter, then hopped into their 10-year-old son’s bedroom.

The animal was wrestled out of the house by the father, Beat Ettlin, and headed for the hills, leaving claw marks on a bed and a trail of blood from cuts caused by the broken glass.

Maxine Cooper, environment commissioner for the government of the Australian Capital Territory, says humans aren’t the only ones at risk. The kangaroos are destroying the grassy native habitat of endangered species such as a 6-inch-long lizard known as the earless dragon.

But “compare that to anything furry with big eyes -- the human emotions generally respond to furriness and big eyes,” Cooper said.

In fact, culls are nothing new. Barry Stuart, who runs a kangaroo slaughterhouse 220 miles north of here, shoots more than 25 of the animals on most nights, with a license from the government. “You don’t like to destroy them, but when the time comes, you’ve got to do it.”

“They’re a beautiful bloody animal,” said Stuart, 60.

But a cull in the capital is likely to be a different matter.

Last year, during the killing of about 400 kangaroos that were close to starvation on fenced military land in Canberra, the protests were so heated that the killers, using stun gun and lethal injections, had to work behind screens.

This time the opposition will be no less vigorous, warned Pat O’Brien, president of the Wildlife Protection Assn. of Australia, whose patrons are the family of the late “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin.

O’Brien insists that, earless dragons notwithstanding, Canberra’s kangaroos pose no environmental problems.

“It’s disgraceful that people want to shoot our national symbol,” O’Brien said. “The days when wildlife is managed with a gun should be long past.”

No one knows how many kangaroos are at large in and around this city of 340,000 people, but its forested hills, grasslands and parks make it perfect kangaroo country, and Cooper says their number needs to be cut by thousands, quickly.

Populations began exploding after European settlers arrived some 220 years ago and felled forests, land into which the plant-eating kangaroos swarmed and multiplied.

The struggle to manage and control Australia’s flora and fauna, native and imported, seems never-ending. Fences thousands of miles long have gone up to keep out rabbits and wild dogs called dingoes. As many as 1 million feral camels introduced as pack animals in the 19th century are denuding the central desert regions.

The larger of the more than 60 kangaroo species have bred so abundantly in some areas that they threaten crops and denude their own habitat.

Government-licensed hunters nationwide shoot an annual quota. They head out at night when kangaroos are at their busiest, and often return with carcasses dangling from hooks on the backs of their trucks.

The quota varies. For 2009 it’s about 4 million, the Kangaroo Industry Assn. of Australia says. Many more will be shot by farmers, who are allowed to kill them to protect crops.

The public has until May 11 to make its views known. Sometime after that, a decision will be made and a quota set.