The deaths of eight Koalas as part of a NSW Government translocation program have been slammed as too risky and referred to the RSPCA for animal cruelty investigations after an expert panel raised serious concerns with the program.
Documents released after a call for papers passed the NSW Parliament last month reveal the Government rejected expert advice and pushed ahead with moving the animals to the South East Forests despite concerns that it was not safe to do so.
Greens MP and spokesperson for the environment Sue Higginson said, “I am so shocked by what has been found in these documents, and the Government and Department should be independently investigated for an avoidable failure where they sidelined experts and pushed ahead with meeting their internal objectives with no care for the animals they were supposed to be protecting. This is why I have referred the Department to the RSPCA for animal cruelty crimes.”
“These documents show a coordinated determination to meet politically motivated departmental relocation targets that led to a reckless indifference to the welfare and fate of the individual animals. Independent expert advice warning of the risks of failure was sidelined, licences were granted in the face of the identified risk of failure and death, animals were left to die after the first koalas were found starved to death, and then what took place can only be described as a coordinated cover up of the truth,”
“The details of these deaths are terrible and show that despite the first discovery that some Koalas had died, the others were left where they were to die as well. One of the koala victims was a perfectly healthy female with an unfurred joey in her pouch when she was taken from her home. She was taken hundreds of kilometres away from her home and released into the wild. There was no soft release for close monitoring and when she was recaptured for checking her joey had died and instead of being taken into care she was left in situ and found dead a few weeks later,”
“Experts have been raising alarm for years about the Department’s lack of expertise to be conducting these types of experiments on Koalas, and these deaths are the tragic outcome of the Government ignoring those concerns. The Department’s determination to meet their targets for political reasons has made them blind to the experts and the evidence and these dead Koalas are the result,”
“Koala translocation is fraught with risk and failure, yet the Department pushed ahead despite expert advice to meet their own internal target. Increasing genetic diversity of koala populations due to habitat destruction is necessary, but we can not engage in such reckless un-scientific experiments in the name of conservation,”
“This was not a koala conservation project, it was a politically motivated animal experimentation. These koalas were treated as lab rats instead of as part of critical conservation work,” she said.
