U.S. Activists Try to Halt an Australian Way of Life: Killing Kangaroos
A bill in Congress aims to ban all kangaroo products from Australia, setting up a clash between two very different kinds of people on opposite ends of the earth.
Ian White, a commercial hunter, carrying a kangaroo he had shot in Surat, Australia.
May 22, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
SURAT, Australia Ian White drove slowly over the red dirt track, past wheat stubble and into the long grass, where he glimpsed a tuft of white fur moving near the woods to his left.
It was a warm autumn night in the Australian outback. He turned on the spotlight sitting atop his truck, finding a kangaroo 150 yards away.
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A dusty gray C-130 rolled to a stop just as the sun was going down over the tarmac of the Air National Guard Station at the Groton-New London Airport in Connecticut on Friday. The plane wasn’t carrying its usual haul of utility helicopters or jeeps. Instead, when the rear cargo door yawned opened, it was three beluga whales from Marineland, an aquatic park in Ontario, Canada, that were sitting aboard, in special water-filled transport containers.
Kharabali, Havana and Jetta, three females, were loaded onto flatbed trucks and driven seven miles east on I-95 to Mystic Aquarium in southeast Connecticut. There, a crane gently lowered them, one by one, into the medical pool, a separate but connected body of water within the aquarium’s 750,000-gallon beluga pool, called Arctic Coast. They were followed by Havok and Sahara, a male and female, nine hours later, completing the highly anticipated, and contested, transfer that was years in the making.