Property owners warned as 'sickening' photo highlights common problem outside Aussie cities
Wildlife rescuers have issued a reminder to property owners after attending a surprising scene on a rural property saving a distressed kangaroo found dangling by its foot in a tall wire fence. While not an uncommon scene in Australia, one detail has highlighted how easy it can happen even when a common culprit isn't involved.
The lone animal was discovered in the very early morning by a dog owner on a neighbouring property in Whittlesea, where suburbs continue to stretch north from Melbourne into rural habitat.
Local man Chris was alerted to the animal's plight after letting his dog out. He called the Melbourne-based group Wildlife Rescuers with volunteer Michael attending to help and wrap up the sizeable animal with a towel and lift her up while Chris cut the fence to free her.
"It doesn't take long for them to do irreparable damage when caught in fences, so she was very lucky to come out of this with no serious injury," Michael said. "Just because she didn't have any injury doesn't mean she is out of the woods. Stress related diseases such as myopathy can still be an issue, so she was taken to a shelter for rehabilitation."
Speaking to Yahoo News from his day job on Monday morning, the rescuer said such "heartbreaking" incidents "happen quite often".
"Usually there is about a case a day where there's one trapped," he said.
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"I actually went to a case a couple months ago when a woman found a kangaroo caught in a fence and it had to be euthanised because its injuries were so bad... But as I was driving further down that road, I found another one and she had just been hanging in the fence and had died, she was all torn apart by other animals. And again, I travelled further and I found another one, deceased and caught in a fence," he told Yahoo.
Typically though, barbed wire fencing in the culprit – something that is notorious among the wildlife carer community for inflicting harm on native wildlife. The fence that ensnared the kangaroo did not actually have any barbed wire in the section where the animal became stuck, and to the naked eye looked perfectly innocuous.
"What happens is the strands can intertwine and their legs get caught. Even if there is no barbed wire, it can still tear skin and shred their feet," Michael warned.
The incident prompted a reminder to Aussies online to be aware about the potential hazard posed by their property boundary line.
"Sickening that this is happening day in and day out all around our beautiful country. You'd think that more landowners would at the very least attach a piece of white tape to the top rung of wire to make it more visible," one local woman wrote.
Michael agreed, saying although he rarely sees it, adding reflective tape to the top of a fence line can improve visibility for wildlife like macropods who can get caught trying to jump over it.
Doug Gimesy recently bought a property in regional Victoria but the very day he moved in, he spotted a kangaroo caught upside down on the barbed wire fence that encased his vast new land.
"We moved down here in May and the first day at our new home we saw an eastern grey kangaroo caught in the top two barbed wire lines of our fence," he told Yahoo News last week. The encounter led him to painstakingly remove the wire from 17 kilometres of fencing along his Wongarra property – a job that took him a solid 10 months to complete.
Speaking to Yahoo, rescuer Michael praised Doug's massive effort and even volunteered to help other property owners to do the same.
"It's a big effort, but I'm glad he did that... I'd even offer to help take some of this crap down, just to avoid having to go out to some of these cases, because it's just heartbreaking," he said, adding in many cases the barbed wire is needlessly adorned around land housing cow, or sometimes mostly empty paddocks.
As for the kangaroo at the top of the story, she remains in care with other injured wildlife being monitored.
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