SYDNEY (AFP) – They may be on the national emblem, but a study has confirmed what many Australians have long suspected: kangaroos are the deadliest animal menace to drivers on the nation's roads.

Kangaroos and their smaller kin, wallabies, are famed for their tendency to leap into the path of highway traffic, endangering not only their own lives but those behind the wheel.

A university study of animal-related crashes in New South Wales state, released Tuesday, found the giant hoppers accounted for 60 percent of fatalities in such accidents. They also accounted for almost 40 percent of such accidents which resulted in injury.

Lead researcher Daniel Ramp said kangaroos posed a greater threat than dogs, wandering stock or horses, and they were most frequently the first object hit, causing a car to veer into a tree or fence.

There were 13 human deaths in almost 2,100 crashes involving kangaroos in the 10 years from 1996, with a person treated for injury from such a crash once every three days, Ramp said.

Most accidents happened between dusk and dawn, when kangaroos tended to be searching for food, and they were much more frequent in the colder months and on weekends, he added.

But Ramp, from the University of New South Wales, warned many crashes went unreported and the real figures were likely to be much higher.

"(It's) clear that only a small fraction of crashes with animals get reported to police," Ramp said.

The odds of hitting a kangaroo are so high most farmers and people living in the country have fitted metal "roo bars" to deflect kangaroo impacts from the front of their vehicle.

Others use high-frequency "roo shoo" whistles to repel the macropods from their path.





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