Culling Of Kangaroos Explored In Oscar Contender ‘Chasing Roo’

When night falls in the Australian outback, the hunt begins.

Prey: roaming – jumping – kangaroos in the wild. Rifle shots ring out, killing millions of them, including hundreds of thousands of female roos, some of whom carry young chicks in their pouches. That's the stark truth explored in the Oscar-shortlisted documentary chase rudirected by two-time Academy Award nominee Skye Fitzgerald (Hunger ward, lifeboat).

“I wanted to do something about this dominance that we assume over animals, in general,” Fitzgerald tells Deadline. “I thought, what better way to do this through the lens of this beloved animal, the kangaroo, the national symbol of Australia. And when I learned that the culling of kangaroos in Australia is the largest commercial killing of a wild animal in the world, I thought this is the way, this is the way I want to.” To tell this story.

The film begins with a scene inside a dark truck, where dead kangaroos are hanging from hooks.

“That shot was from where they load the birds at the end of the hunt, and then they are stored in this refrigerated box for up to a week before another truck comes to collect them and bring them to the slaughterhouse where,” Fitzgerald explains, “they are reprocessed.” “This is a weekly occurrence where that truck comes in. We've seen a number of those times – bodies being moved from the freezer box to the truck. This is realistic.

Kangaroo meat is processed into pet food, and animal hides are turned into leather goods – jackets, wallets, hats, gloves, and even football boots. Humans also consume meat, packaged in grocery stores as steaks, and in ground form as ground beef, and as sausages – known as kanja bangas.

“When you see the marketing of the body, that distance between that package of protein in the supermarket and its source completely evaporates, and it makes you think on a fundamental level about what you are doing to another creature on this planet,” notes the director. “I mean, what gives us the right to eat the body of another creature? I think we have these hands and this brain, but I wanted in the film, not explicitly, but implicitly to kind of question and confront that.

Fitzgerald was a vegetarian for various periods in his life. But he does not approach his topic from a doctrinal perspective.

“One of my goals with the film was to try to create a story that creates empathy for both stalkers and hunters alike,” he says. “I felt like it was really important not to denigrate the audience right away and tell the audience how they feel about this because it's much more complicated than that.”

The film spends time with carers at a wildlife rehabilitation center in western Queensland who rescue orphans, wallabies and other creatures. But it's also about a father and his teenage son – David “Cujo” Colton and Darby Colton – who hunt kangaroos and feral warthogs near Little Aramack in Queensland, a dusty outpost of about 200 people where there are few ways to make shelter. Living.

“One of my intentions was to embrace the cognitive dissonance involved in kangaroo harvesting,” Fitzgerald says. “Kojo, the primary shooter with his son Darby, worships kangaroos – he's said this many times. He has a tattoo of a kangaroo on his torso, clearly saying that this is the animal that allowed him to raise his family and that he loves them. However, it kills hundreds of them every year.

Fitzgerald adds: “These competing realities of economically oppressed communities that depend on harvesting kangaroos for a living coexist with these caring communities…that raise juveniles who have been orphaned. Both are equally valid and authentic. I wanted this cognitive dissonance to be present in the film rather than providing An easy way out or answer for the audience.

The Australian Government's Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water estimated in 2024 the number of kangaroos in five of Australia's six states at 35.3 million. It authorized the execution of nearly 5 million Rho, or 14% of the population. The government describes this catch figure as “sustainable”, but whether this is an accurate assessment or a boost to livestock interests remains debatable.

“The government is in a tough spot. “The herders — the ones who own the most land and raise the sheep and cows — have a very strong set of rhetoric, and they use terms like ‘Russians in plague proportions,’ that's a phrase you hear a lot,” notes Fitzgerald. “The herders have a great So politically powerful that they convinced the government that the roos were in a state of plague because they did not want the roos to compete for grass, pastures and water with their sheep and cows, which are not even indigenous.” Animals, because they are more Profitability, cattle and sheep. So, they've built up this set of rhetoric over a long period of time, which has now kind of been canonized in political discourse. That's really what's going on here.”

The ethical question of whether it is appropriate to kill so many kangaroos extends beyond Australia to countries that import kangaroo products, including the United States. In 2021, the US Congress voted against the Kangaroo Protection Act, which would have banned the sale and import of such products (California has banned such imports since 1971).

Meanwhile, the culling process continues, with a noticeable impact on the kangaroos. The film suggests that the remaining crow populations are shrinking, not necessarily in numbers, but in terms of the size of individual animals. There's a simple explanation for this, Fitzgerald says: Hunters target as many birds as possible; The larger the room, the more money you will produce when harvesting.

“When they kill the alpha males, they actually change the gene pool so that when the alpha males are killed, it's the young ones that reproduce, making for smaller kangaroo sizes,” the director says.

Fitzgerald filmed footage at slaughterhouses where kangaroos are processed but ultimately chose to leave that out of the documentary. However, there are still plenty of supporting photos chase ru.

Rather than intellectualize the issue, he says, his goal was to “bring the viewer into this inaccessible world…I wanted to do it in a way that kind of hits you in the gut where you bear witness, literally, to how we as humans treat animals.”