Wild pet kangaroo attacks and kills 77 year old Perth, Australia man. Victim is discovered with serious injuries, with responding police forced to kill marsupial.
Maybe a pet dog might have the right choice after all…? A 77-year-old Australian man has died after he was attacked by a wild kangaroo that authorities believe he kept as a pet at his home.
The man’s death marked the first fatal kangaroo attack in Australia in 86 years, local media reported.
A relative of the man found him with ‘serious injuries’ on his property in Redmond, a semi-rural area about 250 miles southeast of Perth.
Investigators believe the kangaroo turned on him and attacked him hours before he was found by his relative. To date, authorities declined to release the identity of the victim.
When officers and paramedics arrived at the man’s home, the killer kangaroo was preventing them from reaching its injured owner, forcing cops to shot the marsupial dead, police said.
Victim kept wild animal as pet illegally
‘The kangaroo was posing an ongoing threat to emergency responders,’ police said in a statement.
The man died at the scene. A coroner will record his official cause of death.
Authorities believe the 77-year-old had been illegally keeping the animal as a pet.
There are legal restrictions on keeping Australian native fauna as pets.
Western gray kangaroos are common in Australia’s southwest and can reach up to 4-foot-three-inches tall and weigh up to 119 pounds. The animals are known for their powerful kicks. Male kangaroos can be aggressive and fight people the same way they do amongst each other — by kicking opponents with both clawed hind legs.
Kangaroos have ‘a lot of weapons’ such as sharp teeth, claws and powerful legs, kangaroo behaviour expert Graeme Coulson told Australia’s ABC.
‘Certainly if they’re cornered or in some sort of distress, that can be quite dangerous,’ Associate Professor Coulson said.
First fatality at hands of kangaroo since 1936
The last report of a person being killed by a kangaroo in Australia was in 1936. That year, William Cruickshank, 38, died in a hospital in Hillston in New South Wales state on the Australian east coast from injuries he suffered in a kangaroo attack.
Cruickshank sustained extensive head injuries including a broken jaw after attempting to rescue his two dogs from a large kangaroo, Australia’s ABC News reports.
In July, a kangaroo left a 67-year-old woman with cuts and a broken leg after it attacked her on a walk in Queensland.
Similarly a three-year-old girl suffered serious head injuries in an attack in New South Wales in March.
Urban development across Australia is increasingly encroaching on wild kangaroo habitats.
