Understanding The Kangaroo Divide: Why Is It So Easy to Hate What We Should Be Protecting?
The Kangaroo Divide: Why Is It So Easy to Hate What We Should Be Protecting?
There’s something deeply broken in the way we see our kangaroos.
They’re on our coat of arms, our coins, our tourism posters. Foreigners marvel at them; documentaries celebrate them. Yet at home, too often, they’re dismissed as pests, ridiculed in memes, and treated as roadkill punchlines.
Where is the outrage?
If someone bragged about running over a dog or leaving a cat to die by the roadside, there would be collective fury. But when it’s a kangaroo—one of Australia’s most iconic and vulnerable native animals—people laugh. Dashcam videos go viral. No one blinks.
We’ve been conditioned to devalue them. Industry, media, and culture all too often frame kangaroos as commodities or nuisances rather than living, feeling beings. This narrative dehumanises them—and worse, it desensitises us.
What’s even harder to swallow is the contradiction: many would be horrified at the idea of feeding dog meat to another animal, but have no qualms about serving kangaroo to their pets. What makes one life sacred and another disposable? Is it simply a matter of familiarity? Of whose fur we stroke? Of who sleeps on our couch?
But not all of us see kangaroos as pests.
Some of us see the orphaned joey trembling in her dead mother’s pouch. Some of us walk for hours, scanning the bush for a roo that never came home. Some of us fall asleep with tears in our eyes and the memory of bones cracking under a stranger’s wheels.
And yet we’re called dramatic. Too emotional. Extreme.
No.
Fighting for life—any life—is not weakness. It is humanity at its best.
They Are Families Too
Kangaroos live in mobs. They grieve their losses. They wait for the slow ones. They raise their young with a patience and protectiveness that rivals the most attentive human parent. A roo mum may have one joey at heel, another nestled deep in her pouch—and she knows exactly how to meet both their needs.
Caree gently shares her dinner with her granddaughter Candy—two generations, side by side, showing just how deep family bonds run in kangaroo mobs. These moments remind us: love and connection aren’t just human traits.
They connect. They protect. They nurture.
So why, when a joey is smashed against a tyre or orphaned beside their mother’s corpse, is there no outrage?
If someone snatched a human child from their mother’s arms, there would be national horror. But a joey torn from the only safety it knows—left to starve, cry, or be picked at by crows—is barely a blip in the public eye.
Love doesn’t belong to humans alone. Grief doesn’t either.
It’s not too late to shift the story. We can challenge the narrative. We can advocate. We can open hearts long closed by convenience and conditioning.
If you’ve ever wept for the vulnerable, if you’ve ever cradled something small and scared in your arms, you understand.
Don’t look away.
They are families too. They are mothers too. And they deserve more than to die unseen at the edge of a highway and the edge of our care.
A Mumma kangaroo gently cradles her joey—arms wrapped close. In this quiet moment, love speaks not in words, but in presence. This is family, this is care, this is connection.
And Still, the Silence
But we must ask—why?
Why is there such a disconnect in how we value life?
Why do people laugh at a joey’s death but mourn a dog’s? Why do wildlife carers get mocked, while the cruelty they’re trying to stop goes unchallenged?
The answer is uncomfortable. People mock because it's easier than confronting the truth. They ridicule what they don’t understand. It’s simpler to dismiss compassion than to reckon with what indifference allows.
As carers, we walk a different path—a painful, powerful one. We witness the suffering. We pick up the broken. We lose sleep, time, income, and sometimes hope.
And tragically, we’re starting to lose each other too.
Just this week, another animal advocate took her own life. Someone who gave her soul to animals, worn down by cruelty—not just in the field, but online. Harassment. Mockery. Trolling for daring to care too much.
Why?
When we call out industries like live export or battery hens, it’s the system we confront—not the people. But when we defend wildlife, particularly kangaroos, we become the target. We’re told to “get a life,” while we’re out there saving them.
And still—we carry on.
Because to feel deeply is not a flaw. It is a form of bravery. And it’s something this world needs more of.
Healing the Divide
If we want to change how kangaroos are treated, we must first change how they are seen.
It starts by telling their stories. By sharing their grief and their love. By showing their gentleness, their loyalty, their joy.
It continues by speaking up even when it’s hard. Refusing to let cruelty be the loudest voice in the room. Educating, advocating, and reminding others that love is not limited by species, and neither is suffering.
If you care, you are not alone.
We don’t all need to be carers. But we do all need to care.
Let empathy be the legacy we leave behind—for our wildlife, and for each other.
Love doesn’t belong to humans alone. Grief doesn’t either.
It’s not too late to shift the story. We can challenge the narrative. We can advocate. We can open hearts long closed by convenience and conditioning.
If you’ve ever wept for the vulnerable, if you’ve ever cradled something small and scared in your arms, you understand.
