Journal of Forensic Research

Food Forensics in the Human and Pet-Food Industry: Use of a Simple Technology to Identify Commercially Important Species of Kangaroos from Western Australia

Abstract

Peter B S Spencer and Kevin Marshall

Kangaroos are internationally recognised and iconic wildlife. There are four species that are commercially harvested for human and pet meat in an industry worth more than US$150 million per year. Highly regulated controls govern the number, and the species that can be removed each year as many species undergo natural cycling in population number in response to stochastic fluctuations, such as rainfall (where populations generally increase) and periods of drought (decline in population numbers). At times when populations are too low, seasonal closures do not allow the harvesting of those species. This is when illegal killing is most detrimental and there is currently no method or comparative database to identify commercial game-meat kangaroo species. Here we generated a simple and discriminatory test that uses sequence data from mitochondrial DNA capable of differentiating amongst all the largest species of kangaroos (the wallaroo, western grey, eastern grey, and red kangaroo) in Australia. We present these data and we also include 18 suspected kangaroo sample seizures that formed the basis for the unambiguous, simple and relatively fast identification of seized kangaroo meat samples.