Kangaroo advocate Marcus Fillinger is setting up his own kangaroo fertility trial with the University of Technology in Sydney, slamming the ACT government's trial as out of date, far too slow and doomed to failure.
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Mr Fillinger, a tranquilliser firearms expert and instructor, is a vehement critic of the government's annual kangaroo cull and has been pushing for kangaroo fertility control for some years.
He said the government was wasting time and money on its long-awaited trial, announced two years ago by then minister Shane Rattenbury but yet to work out a way to deliver the contraceptive by dart.
The government has been testing a standard dart and marker dye in carcasses and ballistics gel, but senior government ecologist Claire Wimpenny said last week the dart had now been rejected as too heavy to use in kangaroos. The weight of both vaccine and marker dye meant the dart had to be shot at a speed which could cause quite substantial tissue damage.
Instead, the government is looking to deliver the dye and vaccine separately.
But Mr Fillinger has rejected the approach as incompetent and challenged the government's marksmen to join his trial.
"They're saying you can't remotely administer the vaccine without impact damage which is absolutely false," he said.
"It's not about energiser rates vs velocity, it's about trajectory.
"The dart should fly. It should not go in a straight line. If they're shooting a dart in a straight line, they're doing it incorrectly because it's like shooting [kangaroos] with a bullet."
The government's fertility trial is budgeted to cost $530,000 over two years and involve 125 kangaroos – 65 tranquillised and hand-injected with the vaccine, 10 injected with a placebo, and 50 to be vaccinated by dart once a dart-delivery system had been worked out this year.
Mr Fillinger said the cost was wildly inflated. The vaccine could be delivered for $200 a kangaroo and less in a non-research environment, and and far from needing a team of six to tranquillise and vaccinate the kangaroos it could be done by just two people.
"They're over labouring this process to make it redundantly expensive," he said, also dismissing as "ridiculous" the hand-injection of a vaccine already known to be effective.
Mr Fillinger, who also plans to contest the ACT election this year, is preparing to raise awareness of his kangaroo project with three ultra-marathons over the coming weeks, running the Canberra 100km Challenge on Saturday, March 5, the Running Festival 50km ultra-marathon on April 10, and the Anzac Day 100km Challenge in Sydney on April 23. Each kilometre in his "ks for kangaroos" run represents one of the 250 kangaroos in his trial, he said.
He is working on a smaller dart for delivering the vaccine and said the trial, in partnership with Daniel Ramp, the director of the Centre for Compassionate Conservation at UTS, would be done on and near his property in NSW, just south of the border. He had trialled his methods in ballistics gel and planned to begin vaccinating kangaroos towards the end of the year.
