ARCOHAB Inc.
Association for Respectful Co-Habitation
Promoting and Practising Kindness and Respect for All Animals and the Natural Environment
Kangaroos - The 100 Days Project Day 17 [84]
The Cull

Photo: TBP
Tired and reluctant this
evening on the desert’s edge I
pick up a pen again, don’t
know if I have a poem in me but maybe another
appalling list, the news just to hand
of a cull of camels a long way from anywhere
but perhaps they are taking precious food from cattle or are simply
too hard to muster for export; one million apparently,
and the Prime Minister has signed off on the program put up by the famous
rock-star-turned-politician, on the back
of the ‘culling’ of 6000 kangaroos on
Defence department land six weeks ago, word
of a ‘cull’ of wild horses in Queensland and the news
that the New South Wales government is about to approve
‘recreational’ shooting in National Parks as if the murder of a wild
goat or pig or kangaroo were somehow a re-creating of anything other
than the primal crime of Cain; all this alongside calls
to ‘cull’ koalas, cockatoos, galahs, rosellas, Indian Mynahs, ibises, feral foxes,
crocodiles, cane toads, dingoes, water
buffaloes and almost any other thing that
bites, or shits on washing, croaks or sings too loudly in the early morning, all our
xenophobia our racism our fear of others, the inside-turned-outward of our
horror of the different – so
no, no poem, not even
a diatribe, only a small
and private screaming-place, a cull-de-sac, a
ghostly Valley of the Lost, or museum
of referents, full of whispers, ghost-snort and ghost-pad and
shuffle under the coming starlight, coughs of the night’s
departing, sound
of the trees’ the sand’s
breathing.
David Brooks, 2009