One of the world’s largest importers of kangaroo meat intends to formally ban its trade and sale, according to Irish farm news outlet Agriland.
Belgium is the second-largest importer of kangaroo meat, with the broader European Union taking the top spot.
However, the sale and trade of kangaroo meat has become a tense issue in recent years. In October 2021, The Brussels Times covered an Australian report from the parliament of New South Wales, detailing brutal practices in the course of exporting.
Among concerns raised in the report were the Australian government’s inability to properly monitor whether kangaroo hunting was carried out humanely and its lack of data on the number of orphaned joeys (juvenile kangaroos) euthanized as part of legal culls.
At the time, Eurogroup for Animals CEO Reineke Hameleers was quoted by the Times, emphasizing that “there is no monitoring mechanism to ensure the animals have been killed in the least harmful way.” In 2020, major supermarkets in Belgium such as Aldi and Lidl stopped selling kangaroo meat.
Bans on hunting, fishing, and aspects of the wildlife trade, like bushmeat, which is sourced from wild animals, serve several important purposes in terms of conservation, biodiversity, and public health.
Exotic game meats, in particular, can serve as a vector for zoonotic pathogens that jump from wildlife populations to humans.
Although Australia has long struggled to control its large population of kangaroos, animal welfare concerns still prevailed in Flanders.
The Belgian government has officially informed the European Parliament that it plans to ban the sale of kangaroo meat by July, a mandatory first step toward a policy change that could impact broader trade in the region.
“The commercial hunting of kangaroos in Australia is the largest slaughter of wild land animals in the world,” the Flemish government’s notice read in part, per Agriland.
“Every year, between 1.1 million and 1.3 million kangaroos are killed in an animal-unfriendly manner for the purpose of selling various ingredients on the global market,” it continued. “Flanders contributes disproportionately to animal suffering in Australia.”
According to Agriland, despite the discontinuation of kangaroo meat sales in chain supermarkets in Belgium, it remains available in pet food and at butchers’ shops.
The Belgian government’s notice indicated that, in addition to kangaroo meat, the ban will prohibit the import of kangaroo skins used to manufacture “sports shoes and motorbike jackets.”
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