So Watt’s Watt? What AI knows

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Questions on AI resulted in this response:

“The mass, government-sanctioned killing of protected Australian wildlife is fracturing communities across regional Victoria. What was once a distant issue for many, is now happening ever closer to people’s homes and workplaces. For many, these killings are not isolated events, but part of a broader pattern of loss, intimidation, and bureaucratic neglect. Victorian Government authorities enable these activities, disregarding both their impact on people and the rights of those asking for help”.

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Back to our story

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Here is yet another example of the way in which the mass and cruel killing of protected Australian wildlife, ever closer to where people live and work, divides regional communities. Here is yet another terrible account of the butchering of Kangaroos from central Victoria. It is early March 2026. This activity is government led and enabled, no matter what its impact on the people who get caught in the line of fire.

The small town where the animals were killed nearby Manfred’s rescue and wildlife rehabilitation centre, Five Freedoms Animal Rescue. Manfred’s centre is well known and it is where injured Kangaroos and other wildlife are nursed back to health before they are released back into the wild. Help coming from volunteers from around the world.

The killing field also not that far away from our once beautiful early Australian home and conservation property of decades and so much more, lost in a maelstrom of threats, gun crime, assaults, vandalism, an attempted arson attack and compliance by governments happy to join in to see us gone, including an attempt at a road to nowhere through our garden. On and on it went and there was nothing we could do about any of it, ignored and threatened in the hope we would just disappear.

Like everyone else who finds themselves in the same situation in Victoria, people who ask for help are sent from one government department to another, round in circles and then there are the endless rebuttals and denials. The distress of the process, deliberate and knowing, is what makes this all so chilling. Where are the law, the justice, the ownership rights, the kindness and the commonsense? Nowhere is the answer.

So, like others after us, we lived the nightmare and the loss, our plans for the future broken beyond repair, our generosity and kindness swept away in the tide of destruction and loss.

The kinds of killing events described below are occurring around the State of Victoria as catastrophic wildfires burn and in just 5 days the annual slaughter of waterbirds begins around the state. It is dangerous out there.

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Manfred says:

“As a person committed to animal welfare, and as someone who is particularly passionate about our beautiful Kangaroos, the event of last night was as bad as it gets. It was traumatic”.

Manfred goes on to say I received a call from a resident of the nearby township. The night was beautiful: serene, balmy, crystal-clear skies, stars. But the tranquillity was stolen. Within minutes of arriving, we heard blast after blast after blast from a high-powered rifle. Every bang represented death, or injury. Orphans. Our skin crawled.

The killing field was smack in the middle of town, surrounded by nearby homes, close to neighbours with horses and other animals, adjoining the local pony club. We attempted to get closer to observe and record this atrocity, and to try to stop it, but Kangaroos that we encountered on the roads were safe and we risked scaring them toward the shooter. So, we stopped. We felt helpless. We felt sick. We felt like we betrayed our Kangaroos, but we had no choice. Local residents that were woken by the gunshots while lying in their beds, came out and joined us. They were upset, angry.

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They rang the police, but no officers came.

After the killing had stopped the shooter drove away from the town with around thirty headless bodies hanging on the back of his Ute. Some of the Kangaroos were quite small and there was no way the shooter could have distinguished males from females because of how small some of the animals were and at the shooting distances in the darkness of the night. There is little doubt that there were joeys amidst the slaughter. It was confronting. All the killing and cruelty happened close to my home, my shelter, my Kangaroo family.

This event was something I never wanted my amazing international volunteers to see. Michelle (USA/NZ), Chloe (UK), Ninie (France), and Kaatje (Belgium) have worked so, so hard to help me run my wildlife shelter with cleaning, with laundry, with bottle-washing and milk preparation, with nursing and intense joey loving, and with bandage changes on burns victims from the recent Victorian bushfires. Our Kangaroos have had to do it hard again this year. But tonight, hard doesn’t come close.

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This is a vision of Australia that they will never forget.

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