If you don’t think kangaroos are terrifying, you’re lying to yourself. They’re buff-as-hell Australian mega-rabbits who will drown a dog without a second thought, and can hide anything they want in a freaky little slime-pouch. A baby? A gun? Who knows. Stop asking and just run. Red kangaroos, the largest species, can hop at 35 mph, with a 25-foot jump that can get as high as 10 feet. The biggest males can get up to 200 lbs., like the internet-famous Ripped Roger, who stood 6 feet, 7 inches and is probably on his way to steal your girl right now.
They’ve also got raptor-sharp Freddy Krueger claws geared for gutting opps and gouging eyes. They throw hands with a punch force of about 275 pounds. They can kick you in your chest with 759 pounds of pure, down-under thunder. And when they bite, they come down on you with the same chomping power as a grizzly bear at 925 PSI. There’s a reason a group of them is called a mob.
I regret to inform you that the kangaroos have also messed with Texas. Wild mobs of them are running loose in the state. Well, I mean, two really. Two kangaroos. But that’s how many were on the Ark and now look where we are. Besides, these Texas roos are built different; they’re straight-up beef kings. Loose roos are also flexing on South Carolina. One escaped from local farmer Raford Bussey in 2018, though nobody knows exactly how a kangaroo ended up on a Bussey farm. We do know, however, that these magnificent aggro-bros fight each other often. It’s brutal. Sometimes they even push each other off cliffs. Sick.
And now two Republican state lawmakers want to make New Hampshire the 14th state to legalize the farming and ownership of kangaroos. I am begging you all not to stop these men. This is what America needs right now.
Republican state Rep. Tom Mannion has filed a bill that would make it legal to own not only kangaroos but small-tailed monkeys, raccoons, foxes and otters — without requiring a permit — after a constituent contacted him on Twitter (or X, as no one calls it). Mannion’s colleague, GOP Rep. Michael Granger, has since filed a bill that would legalize kangaroo farming, an industry some groups say offers sustainable local food production.
Though roos are so abundant they aren’t typically farmed in Australia, would-be US kangaroo farmers stand to learn a lot from the nation as they grow into the new livestock trade. The selective hunting of about 3 million roos annually in Australia is carefully regulated by most accounts. Licenses are portioned out only after annual government headcounts, and apply only to four non-threatened species with few natural predators and routine population booms. To get a license to hunt them, you’ve got to be a skilled and humane marksman; you have to kill the animal with a single headshot.
Even so, the culling of kangaroo herds in Australia is the largest for-profit wildlife slaughter in the world outside of commercial fishing. It’s a grim job, and it’s attracted heavy activist pushback. Australian ecologists, however, have repeatedly supported commercial harvesting as a necessary aid to the nation’s kangaroo population management. As The Washington Post reported, those calls were echoed by eight wildlife scientists and 25 conservation, farming and Aboriginal organizations in 2021.
These aren’t just herds of wild javelina, justifiably rooting up plush Sedona golf courses in their natural habitat to find some grubworms during a drought. Kangaroos are far worthier opponents. They will not only take over golf courses, they will hunt you down.
Like the 90-strong mob that took over the Royal Canberra Golf Course in Canberra. One guy was just heading back to the fourth tee to retrieve his fancy golf-club sock he forgot, when he got a little too close to a roo and startled it. Next thing you know — boom! — kanga-rage, baby! The marsupial bolted after the dude, ready to hop straight for the guy’s neck. Guy ran flat-out for 200 yards, so full of primal terror that a fountain of puke started erupting out of his guts all over the fairway as he was running.
Four of his boys saw him hauling ass and blowing chunks at top speed which, if you think about it, must have looked absolutely insane until they saw the rampaging murderoo behind him. At which point, they had to come running toward the roo, bellowing and brandishing their golf clubs like cavemen on the fifth hole, just to get it to stop charging.
Whatever beer they drank afterward must have been the best of their lives, but the whole thing shook up the club enough that it had to do something. So it hired a veterinarian who now goes out on the course, sneaking around and stalking kangaroos with a tranquilizer dart-gun. Once a male roo gets knocked out with a tranq dart, the vet rips the kangaroo’s nuts off with an open-air vasectomy.
Kangaroos don’t just wake up and choose violence, though. They’re usually shy, curious little fellows. But if you threaten them or if your dogs (which look like predatory dingoes) get too close, they will fully end you.
Ever slapped a kangaroo in the face? I have not. But when a super-jacked kangaroo tried to drown his dog Hatchi, mixed martial arts trainer Mick Maloney jumped in the water and slapped the hell out of a roo. This beast was mad strong, though, and Maloney had to go hard to save Hatchi — wrestling the roo in the water until he could blind it with splashes and get Hatchi to the shore.
“I was like ‘this thing’s just got out of jail’ or something,” said Maloney.
Another man who beat some kanga ass said he went toe-to-toe with a crazed roo because it was “trying to rip my little dogs out of the yard.”
“He gouged me on the top of me head, he bit me finger, he shredded me down the arm a bit and he gored me in the back of the leg,” said former boxing trainer Cliff Des.
Then there was the Twitch streamer who tried to pet a kangaroo last month right before it gave her that outback clapback.
"I’m your friend! I said be nice,” she chided the roo. “He f**king punched me! Ow! My God!”
One of the earliest known boxing movies, a 1896 black-and-white reel, showed a kangaroo kicking a kid’s ass in the ring. And in 1962, a kangaroo flattened former boxing champion Freddie Mills with a KO during a circus fight. Some may think kangaroo boxing was a cruel chapter in the world’s history — and maybe they’re right — but now the roos have gotten too strong. It’s time to take them down a peg, and put them to work for the American people as climate-neutral icons of sustainable farming.
In the spirit of full disclosure, my general position on meat eating has always been that you should ethically and sustainably eat as many different animals as possible, even if only once, so you can absorb all their powers.
Have you ever eaten donkey blood? I have. I spooned it down with abandon in the Andes Mountains once. Because what if I have to fight a donkey someday? I want to know with unshakable certainty that if I ever find myself locked into life-or-death donkey combat, I could look straight into that animal’s beautiful, merciless eyes and find no fear in my heart. Having savored its flesh between my teeth, I will thus fight like a true donkey warrior. Neither do I fear monsters of the watery depths. The first time I ate calamari, I knew I could chew through any live tentacle like a Johnsonville brat.
This is America. I shouldn’t have to fear kangaroos if I ever have to battle them for my freedom — I should be able to eat them right now with a side of french fries and 750 ice-cold milliliters of Mad Dog 20/20. It’s no surprise that Indigenous people have eaten lean, high-protein kangaroo meat for more than 40,000 years. Hell, I’m Googling right now which restaurants serve roo-burgers just so I can assert some dominance and quell the anxiety attack.
And, no, it’s not just about my own selfish desires. American farmers need a climate-friendly win here and roo herding could offer that. According to the Kangaroo Industry Association of Australia, the meat and hides (exported to 70 countries) account for about $133 million a year.
With all the climate-damaging methane production and cruelty of factory farms, I’m looking for ways to change our country’s food supply chains. I’m moving different. And kangaroos fart different. They produce 600 times less methane-per-fart than cows. They also eat less than cows, so sustaining a herd is less demanding on agricultural supply and overall less expensive for farmers. It seems to be thanks to a bacteria in baby kangaroo poop that, in an artificial cow stomach, cows could be shown to also produce less methane. It also seems to get the cows buff, but I dare not ask how that happens.
So the question isn’t whether New Hampshire should legalize eco-friendly kangaroo farming — of course it should — but how we should prioritize this miraculous new boon of a sustainable natural resource for the betterment of our nation. And, more specifically, do kangaroos know how to fire AR-15s, or should I just stick to Brazilian jiu jitsu?
An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Salon's Lab Notes, a weekly newsletter from our Science & Health team.
