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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: November/December 2007

Queensland is air-gunning 10,000 brumbies

 

BRISBANE--The government of Queensland, Australia is already well advanced in a scheme to massacre wild horses on an unprecedented scale.

"More than 10,000 brumbies will be slaughtered in Queensland in a massive cull the State Government has tried to hide," revealed Brisbane Courier-Mail reporter Des Houghton on November 9, 2007."

Documents obtained by the Courier-Mail show fears of a public outcry led to high-level talks on how to conceal one of world's largest animal culls," wrote Houghton. "Earlier this year, then-environment minister Lindy Nelson-Carr told former premier Peter Beattie that the killing 'has the potential to precipitate vocal opposition from small special-interest groups with strong inflexible views.'

"Thousands of horses have already been shot, including 4000 at the popular Carnarvon National Park in central Queensland," Houghton said. "In remote areas, the animals are left to rot where they fall. But government documents show that in other areas shooters were instructed to hide the bodies.

Save the Brumbies spokesperson Jan Carter told Houghton that she had received photographs of the Carnarvon cull from an anonymous government employee. The horses are shot from helicopters. Carter said the photos show wounded horses left to suffer and foals left orphaned among the remains of their herds.

"For years and years the problem of wild horses has not been addressed," Carter told Agence France-Presse. "And then the idea is 'Well, let's go in and shoot them.' It's very inhumane. You only have to see the photos to know they died in agony."

Carter "urged the Government to set up brumby sanctuaries and consider infertility treatments to restrict wild horses breeding," Houghton wrote. But Houghton said the Royal RSPCA "has condoned the program, raising the ire of hardline animal groups," though noting that "RSPCA spokesman Michael Beattie said his organisation first suggested the use of infertility drugs 10 years ago and supported sanctuaries."

"The RSPCA reluctantly accepts that some sort of cull had to go ahead," Beattie elaborated to Agence France-Press, "but we believe something should have been done about the situation years before now. We are pleading with the government to introduce fertility control sooner rather than later."

"The program is not about eradication of feral horses," insisted Queensland sustainability minister Andrew McNamara, "but rather about ensuring the population is kept at a manageable level, in consideration of the welfare of both the horses and the native wildlife in the park. For the first phase of the program, we investigated all the options, and shooting was considered to be the most humane solution."

McNamara alleged that the horses "are causing serious erosion, spreading weeds, destroying freshwater springs and other water courses, damaging aboriginal cultural sites, competing with native wildlife for feed, and destroying habitat." McNamara did not mention that horses purportedly also compete for grass with sheep and cattle when they roam outside Carnarvon National Park, an especially sensitive topic in the continuing string of drought years. While Queensland may have as many as 100,000 brumbies, according to official estimates, Queensland has 11.7 million sheep.

"Documents uncovered by the Courier-Mail confirm that large-scale culling will continue throughout Queensland for at least three years in at least four different regions," Houghton wrote. "The documents show the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Primary Industries is supporting the mass shooting and trapping of feral animals, including horses, deer, pigs, goats, dingoes and foxes."

All are either competitors or predators of sheep.

A previous furor over brumby-culling methods arose in Western Australia in March 2006, when Member of Parliament Gary Snook objected to the practice of the Department of Conservation and Land Management of fencing wild horses away from water before reintroducing native fauna. This had been done for seven years before Snook became aware of it. Brumbies from those herds were used as warhorses by Australian troops in World War I. Fourteen of the horses were captured and tamed by the Outback Heritage Horse Association as a demonstration of taming as an alternative to either killing them or causing them to die of thirst.

"Those horses carried us to war, they carried us to water, they carried us to safety and I just think that what the Outback Heritage Horse Association is doing is a marvellous act of national spirit that we need to really sit up and take notice of," Snook told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

The Department of Conservation and Land Management, which calls itself CALM, responded that it "has a suitable shooting program for feral animals and animals which are in distress."

Another organization, the Guy Fawkes Heritage Horse Association, captured and tamed more than 100 brumbies between 2000 and 2005, after then-New South Wales environment minister banned shooting horses from the air in NSW national parks.

Brumby Watch Australia co-founder Kristine Sempf recommended that the Queensland herd should be thinned by capture and taming. "Her son Nathan has a tamed horse saved from a cull at Greenbank, south of Brisbane," Houghton said.