A 77-year-old man was killed by a wild kangaroo that he may have been raising as a pet in southwest Australia, police announced on Tuesday. The death marks the first fatal kangaroo attack in the country since 1936.
The man was identified as Peter Eades, a local alpaca farmer, by Australian news outlet 9News.
A relative of Eades found him with “serious injuries” on his property in semirural Redmond, 400 kilometres from the Western Australia state capital of Perth. It’s believed that the kangaroo had attacked Eades earlier in the day.
Paramedics raced to the scene but were prevented from giving the 77-year-old medical attention by the looming kangaroo, and were forced to call police to assist.
“The kangaroo was posing an ongoing threat to emergency responders,” a statement from police read.
When law enforcement arrived, they shot and killed the kangaroo. Eades was pronounced dead at the scene when paramedics were able to finally reach him.
Police are preparing a report for a coroner, who will record an official cause of death.
Police believe the victim had been keeping the wild kangaroo as a pet despite legal restrictions on keeping Australian native fauna.
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Western gray kangaroos are common in Australia’s southwest. They can weigh up to 54 kilograms and stand 1.3 metres tall.
Male kangaroos can be aggressive and fight people with the same techniques as they use with each other. They use their short upper limbs to grapple with their opponent, use their muscular tails to take their body weight, then lash out with both their powerful clawed hind legs.
Fatal kangaroo attacks are extremely uncommon because a kangaroo’s first instinct is to flee, said an expert to the New York Times. The animals will not attack unless they feel cornered. To illustrate the rarity, one has to go back nearly a century to find the last fatal attack on a human by a kangaroo.
In 1936, William Cruickshank, 38, died in a hospital in Hillston in New South Wales state on the Australian east coast months after he’d been attacked by a kangaroo.
Cruickshank suffered extensive head injuries including a broken jaw as he attempted to rescue his two dogs from the kangaroo, The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper reported at the time.
Graeme Coulson, a kangaroo behavioural expert, told ABC News that “the problem with kangaroos and people is we’re both upright animals, we stand on our two feet, and an upright stance like that is a challenge to the male kangaroo.”
“They don’t distinguish between people and other kangaroos,” Coulson said. “And that gets particularly risky when the male grows, and becomes bigger and stronger, and then you can have problems like this.”
Eades had previously been profiled by ABC because of his devotion to his alpaca herd. He named each animal and built a cemetery to bury them in. He told the outlet in 2017 that he wished to be buried beside his favourite alpaca, Claudia, when he died.
— With files from the Associated Press
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