Harvesting Freely Roaming Public Resources: Can Property Owners Harvest Kangaroos Utilizing Their Land Without Impacting Neighbors?

Abstract

In Australian semiarid rangelands, there have been suggestions that kangaroo harvesting should be given much more serious consideration as a supplement or even replacement to income from domestic stock like cattle and sheep. The possibility of kangaroo harvesting ever being economically viable, however, is often dismissed due to the impossibility of constraining these freely roaming animals to a particular property. In this paper, we explore the extent to which landholders do have control of their harvests regardless of the activities on neighboring land. Three scenarios are investigated: a property with a porous border that is surrounded by a reserve, like a national park, that is much larger and where harvesting is prohibited; a pair of properties with porous borders where harvesting is permitted and landholders act cooperatively; and finally two properties with porous borders where harvesting is permitted and landholders act competitively. The results indicate that despite the freely roaming nature of kangaroos, private property owners can obtain harvests proportional to the extent to which their land and grazing resources are utilized.