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Article: Are koalas in decline?
- Article from:
- Review - Institute of Public Affairs
- Article date:
- June 1, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright Institute of Public Affairs Jun 2005. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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When I want to know how many sheep there are, I just look up the Australian Commodity Statistics. There were 174.3 million sheep in 1970, 118.6 million at the turn of the century (year 2000) and 99.3 million in 2003-obviously a species in decline. But it is never as easy when I want to know how many native animals there are. The best advice on koalas seems to be that there are somewhere between 100,000 and one million in Australia. That's an order-of-magnitude difference of 1,000 per cent -extracted from a published paper in a reputable journal.
So I began my fortnightly column for The Land newspaper in March. After I sent the piece off, I was half expecting to be corrected, to discover ...