By Rod McGuirk
Canberra - They bounce across the roof of Parliament House. They collide with cars. They come in through the bedroom window.
Canberra, Australia's capital, has a problem: too many kangaroos.
The authorities have tried giving them vasectomies and oral contraceptives, to no avail. They say trucking them to new and distant pastures is too expensive. Now they're proposing a cull. But many people are aghast at the idea of their best-known marsupial being shot en masse in the national capital.
A government survey has found that more than 80 percent of Canberra residents think the wild kangaroos should stay. On the other hand, in a different survey, 17 percent of drivers in the district reported having collided with a kangaroo at least once.
Canberra's latest man-versus-roo horror story concerns a confused 1.75m beast that bounded through a closed bedroom window last month on to a bed where a couple huddled with their nine-year-old daughter, then hopped into their 10-year-old son's bedroom.
Maxine Cooper, the environment commissioner for the government of the Australian Capital Territory, said humans weren't the only ones at risk - the kangaroos were destroying the grassy native habitat of endangered species such as a 15cm-long lizard known as the earless dragon.
"Compare that to anything furry with big eyes," she said. "The human emotions generally respond to furriness and big eyes."
In fact, culls are nothing new. Barry Stuart, who runs a kangaroo abattoir 350km north of Canberra, shoots more than 25 on most nights with a licence from the government.
"You don't like to destroy them, but when the time comes, you've got to do it," said Stuart.
But a cull in the capital is likely to be a different matter.
Last year, during the killing of about 400 kangaroos that had eaten themselves close to starvation on fenced military land in Canberra, the protests were so heated that the killers, using stun guns and lethal injections, had to work behind screens.
This time the opposition would be no less vigorous, warned Pat O'Brien, the president of the Wildlife Protection Association of Australia, whose patrons are the family of the late "Crocodile Hunter", Steve Irwin.
O'Brien insisted that, earless dragons notwithstanding, Canberra's kangaroos posed no environmental problems.
"The days when wildlife is managed with a gun should be long past," O'Brien said.
No one knows how many kangaroos are at large in and around the city of 340 000 people, but its forested hills, grasslands and parks make it perfect kangaroo country.
The public has until May 11 to make its views known. Some time after that a decision will be made and a quota set.
"No one likes wild animals more than I do - I'm a real soft-hearted old bugger," Stuart said. "But you've got to manage them otherwise you'll be overrun by the bloody things."