Kangaroo Farming to cut Emissions in Australia

We are still trying to figure out how to reduce emissions and while people down under are getting really serious about the possible choices. As some of you already know, New Zealand is studying how to reduce methane in cattle, while Australia is looking at ways to reduce Methane kangaroos as farm animals.

Farming kangaroos instead of sheep and cattle in Australia could cut by almost a quarter the greenhouse gas methane produced by grazing livestock, which account for 11% of the nation's annual emissions, said a new study. Removing seven million cattle and 36 million sheep by 2020 and replacing them with 175 million kangaroos, to produce the same amount of meat, could lower national greenhouse gases by 3% a year, said the University of New South Wales study. Methane's warming potential over a 100 year time frame is 21 times higher than that of carbon dioxide. The study said changing farming practices in Australia, which is one of the world's top wool and beef producers but sells by comparison only small amounts of kangaroo meat for human consumption would not be easy. "One of the impediments to change is protective legislation and the status of kangaroos as a national icon," it said. The kangaroo is on Australia's coat of arms, but farmers regard them as pests that compete for grazing pastures with sheep and cattle.

Interesting how we are going to have to change our view of the creatures that share our planet.

Saw a journalist eating scorpion on a stick in a market in Beijing yesterday that an many other delicacies that the Chinese use for protein.