There’s a photo doing the rounds on social media at the moment that perfectly encapsulates why Australian wildlife is simultaneously beloved and terrifying. It shows a kookaburra – you know, that chunky bird with the distinctive laughing call that we all grew up hearing – casually munching on a tiger snake like it’s a particularly chewy strand of spaghetti.

Someone described kookaburras as “metal af” and honestly, I can’t think of a better description.

The anger in that Reddit post hit me right in the gut. Here’s someone trying to do the right thing - restoring native bushland for wildlife - only to watch it get torn apart night after night by feral pigs. What makes it worse is knowing that some of these destructive animals are out there because people deliberately released them so they’d have “something to hunt.”

The photo they shared of their chewed-up land tells the whole story. Hundreds of square metres of ground torn up, native grasses dying, topsoil washing away with the next rain. It’s heartbreaking to see decades of potential recovery work undone in a single night by animals that shouldn’t even be here.