Introducing: Cute Animal of the Week

Its week bloody seven and you’re already sacking off most of your lectures and the seminars which don’t take registers. Even when you do go to a seminar you just hang your head in shame without a clue of what was in the reading.

You’ve got an essay looming which you know you should be starting but you haven’t even checked when its due or what the title is because, much like your bank balance, its a bit too scary to look at now and its just easier to push the worried nagging voice to the back of your head instead of dealing with it like an adult. So much for that first you were secretly hoping for at the beginning of the year.

Shame on you, but don’t worry, since its Tuesday and every Tuesday is just a bit crap, we at The Tab want to lift your spirits and what better way to do that is there than with a cute animal? Introducing, cute animal of the week!

This week our cute animal is: the quokka!

Aww! What is that? A rat?

No, its a quokka. Quokkas are marsupials known not just for their charming smiles but for their friendliness to humans. So friendly and approachable are they in fact that people can get close enough to take selfies with them! If a selfie with a quokka isn’t enough to get you likes, then I really don’t know what will…

Give me the David Attenborough lowdown…

Quokkas are relatives of kangaroos and wallabies, and they’re about as big as domestic cats. They chill together in clans, spending most of their adorable day eating swamp peppermint and digging through vegetation where they sleep and hide. If that’s not cute enough, a quokka baby is called a ‘joey’ and it lives in its mothers pouch for 6 months after birth. When they are 18 months old they are able to have their own babies, and in the wild a quokka will live up to 10 years.

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Where can I see one?

They can be found off the coast of West Australia, especially on Rottnest Island (where there are up to 12,000 of the critters) and Bald Island but also some eucalyptus forests and riverbanks on the mainland. The reason quokkas are so abundant on Rottnest is because the island was made into an Aboriginal penal colony in the 1830s, which meant for obvious reasons there weren’t too many visitors but luckily for the quokkas, it meant their habitat was largely left alone. The mainland quokkas suffered a different fate however, and being the naturally destructive beings we humans are, we hunted them down and poisoned the ‘vermin’ (classic us) until there weren’t many left.

Can I get one as a pet?

 You can only wish. Quokkas are classified as vulnerable animals due to their shrinking populations and they’ve lost a lot of their habitats from logging and development. This means its very illegal to keep them as pets. I know, but they look so cuddly! Well, life is tough… get a hamster or something instead.

What can I do to help them?

If you plan on visiting the quokkas, the most important thing you can remember to do is not to feed them (it might kill them) and, as hard as it sounds, not to touch them. There is a hefty fine dished out to those who break these rules and they are necessary partly because of recent spates of cruelty towards quokkas, including people setting them on fire.

If you want to do even more to help quokkas, the best causes to support are those that aim to reduce logging in Western Australia which supports their habitats.

Check out some more facts, or sign the petition here.