I really didn’t want to engage on the topic of Wombatgate, but I am afraid that I cannot keep silent.
For those who are unfamiliar with this latest cause for outrage, US social media “influencer” and self-described “wildlife biologist and environmental scientist” Sam Jones was in Australia recently.
It appeared that Jones and her boyfriend stumbled upon a baby wombat and its mother while driving along a country road one night.
A video posted to social media and lasting less than a minute showed Jones picking up the baby wombat, running over to her camera-wielding boyfriend to share her excitement with the mother in chase, and then proceeding to let the wombat go again.
The reaction was swift and severe, with one set of wildlife warriors saying that Jones inflicted terror on the animals and caused for criminal penalties, while the RSPCA senior scientific officer Di Evans commenting that the video showed that “any separation” of mother and joey was harmful.
Even the Prime Minister weighed in, calling the incident an “outrage,” while Immigration Minister Tony Burke was busy checking if Jones had breached her visa conditions.
My favourite, though, was probably Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek, who called it “so distressing for the baby wombat, so distressing for the mother wombat” and confirmed she had sought advice about whether Jones could be prosecuted.
Jones initially issued an apology but also pushed back on the criticism she received.
In a follow-up social media post, Jones noted that the Australian government permits the slaughter of wombats by landowners.
“Thousands each year are shot, poisoned to suffer, and trapped legally,” she wrote.
“Landowners rip up wombat burrows with heavy machinery, poison them with fumigation, and shoot them whenever they can… The landowner is trying to survive, to raise you the lamb for your dinner table, the grapes for your wine, and the produce for your salads.
“Wombats get in the way of this, through putting their holes and tunnels across the land, creating hazard for livestock, and turning up the ground to eat roots.”
It seemed Jones wasn’t going to cop the heat without pointing out some hypocrisy. She also highlighted the government-sanctioned and even government-funded killing of other forms of wildlife over the past two decades.
As much as I salute Jones’ push back, I don’t think she went far enough. Because as I watched all the outrage over this 60-second separation of a wombat and joey, all I could think was, “they don’t show the same outrage over surrogacy.”
It seems to me that there has been much more outrage about the momentary separation of a baby wombat from its mother than there ever has been about the permanent separation of babies born of surrogate mothers, whether in Australia or overseas.
Surrogacy is not uncommon for Australians.
There are about four babies born each week to overseas surrogates for Australian parents, and—despite commercial surrogacy technically being illegal here in Australia—we are the third largest user of commercial surrogacy services in the world and the highest per capita.
Far from being outraged by this, it seems that our governments want to increase this separation, with both the NSW state government and the federal government initiating inquiries into existing surrogacy laws with a view to making them more common, both here and overseas.
If “any separation” of mother and joey is harmful, as Di Evans of the RSPCA said, and “so distressing” as Tanya Plibersek said, then why would we allow it to happen in the human context?
I have no position on social media influencers or Wombatgate; but I do have a position on double standards.
The outrage levelled at Sam Jones, particularly by politicians, leaves us with one of two possibilities. Either they care more about baby wombats than baby humans, or they think we do.