Wildlife campaigner devastated by daily animal deaths

She loves kangaroos but this wildlife campaigner ends most days covered in their blood. Here’s why the kangaroo advocate says she has no other option but to kill the iconic animals.

Wildlife campaigner Krysti Severi.

Krysti Severi doesn’t look like she spends her days rushing to euthanise one broken kangaroo after another.

But, after dropping her children at school, that is exactly what the wildlife campaigner does, and she doesn’t earn a penny for it.

The self-dubbed “farm girl”, who juggles life as a mother and full-time wildlife volunteer with night work at Coles doesn’t fit the radical wildlife campaigner stereotype.

On a rainy Friday, I meet Krysti at Doreen McDonalds.

She arrives wearing ballet flats and skinny jeans.

We wait for a volunteer dispatcher to start ringing with reports of kangaroos in the area needing help.

Krysti euthanises about 50 kangaroos a week.

Within five minutes the dispatcher alerts us to a kangaroo with two suspected fractures in Doreen.

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As we drive to the scene, Krysti takes a call from a distressed member of the public.

She talks the woman through how to do a pouch check on a dead kangaroo in Mernda.

The hysterical caller manages to will herself to pull a “cold” joey, also with a broken leg, from the mother.

As we pull up to the Doreen site, Krysti thanks the caller for “being so brave” and not only reporting the dead kangaroo, but caring enough to check its pouch.

This she says, is something barley anyone does.

As soon as Krysti sees the young kangaroo, she says it’s an instant euthanise case.

The frightened animal drags its broken and bloody legs as Krysti approaches it.

She attempts to calm the animal by covering it with a blanket and making clicking noises which mimic those made by mothering roos.

Arthur, a joey being fostered by Krysti.

And then, the woman who has spent the past three years fighting to protect and advocate for kangaroos, has to put yet another one out of its misery.

Before she puts the roo down she gives the animal a kiss.

“We always say we are sorry to them for the human race letting them down,” she said.

Krysti does not take a lunch break, instead she goes home to bottle feed and toilet train four orphaned joeys she is fostering.

The joeys are fed every five hours.

By school pick up time Krysti has euthanised another two animals.

A kangaroo with a broken leg left long enough for maggots to form on an open wound, and a wallaby with a broken foot left so long the break has solidified.

The wallaby disappears into a mass of blackberry bushes.

Krysti Severi chases the injured wallaby into a blackberry bush.

Forty minutes later Krysti emerges, covered in prickles and lice from the wallaby which, despite being dead, has fur that moves from the hundreds of lice that infested it.

Krysti arrives for school pick up still pulling out the prickles and wiping a pool of dried kangaroo blood from her jeans.

The job is not glamorous. It does not even pay, but for Krysti, not helping the animals which adorn Australia’s coat of arms but whose corpses also litter Whittlesea’s streets, is unimaginable.

Ending the lives of the animals she cares so passionately about is “not a nice feeling”.

“It’s a horrible feeling,” she said.

“Emotionally it’s taxing, mentally it’s taxing.”

But in a municipality without a wildlife ranger who euthanises animals and fifty drivers a week who do not report having hit kangaroos, Krysti does not see the devastation ending anytime soon.