Brumbies: the right horse in the wrong place
Why the culling of wild horses is being considered to save endangered alpine habitats. By Gabrielle Chan in Kosciuszko national park.
THE LAST mare in Dead Horse Gap lies dying on a pure-white bed of snow. Her ears twitch, but she’s too weak to lift her head. About her, her fellow mob lie in various stages of decay, food for foxes.
The mare, like her mates, is starving to death in Australia’s alpine winter landscape after being caught in a mountain pass between New South Wales and Victoria when the late snow arrived.
It’s a bad year for Australia’s wild horses caught in the upper reaches of the Australian Alps but it could get worse as national parks in the two states decide how to manage brumby numbers, which they say are out of control.
It was during the first years of European settlement some 150 years ago that horses escaped into the bush. They became known as brumbies after the soldier and landholder James Brumby, who deliberately released his horses because he could no longer keep them.
Today, Victoria and NSW are considering ‘‘wild horse management plans’’ for the next five years. Both will address how to cull brumbies with all methods on the table, in an effort to protect Australian habitats and species.
While herds are dying of starvation on top of the mountain, down on the open plains of the now-deserted gold mining village of Kiandra, a mob of 24 brumbies tramps through the appropriately named Racecourse Creek, conservationists say, wreaking havoc.
The creek forms part of the Eucumbene catchment, delivering water to more than 2 million people downstream and home to the ‘‘ super moss’’ sphagnum. Sphagnum is highly prized for holding a lot of water and carbon. It is the breeding ground for the endangered corroboree frog. The surrounding environment is habitat for other endangered species such as the pygmy possum, the broad-toothed rat, the mountain she- oak skink and the guthega skink.
The alpine bogs, according to Professor Emeritus Geoff Hope of the Australian National University, are the perfect water distribution system.
When the rain falls, the bogs hold on to the water and then slowly release it so it does not create great gullies cutting through the landscape. And the brumbies have heavy hooves.
‘‘Horses can do incredible damage incredibly quickly because it is soft stuff and they are great heavyhoofed animals. The long- term effect is to block the drainage and hold the water in the catchment for a lot longer than it would otherwise be,’’ Hope says.
The Australian Alps are contained within 11 national parks and nature reserves spilling across NSW, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory. The mountains are the headwaters to the country’s three best-known rivers, the Murray, the Murrumbidgee and the Snowy. The last aerial survey of brumbies in 2009 estimated 7,679 across the alps, up from 2,369 after the 2003 bushfires. The numbers were forecast to grow to more than 13,000 by 2012. The latest count from the 2014 survey is expected in the coming months.
Brumby advocates dispute the numbers, suggesting mustering by helicopter in rugged terrain concentrates horses through valleys, which leads to double counting. It also assumes annual growth of about 20 per cent, which does not account for bad seasons, such as the deaths caused by this year’s late snow.
Nev Barrass, a livestock carrier and proprietor of Thredbo Valley Horse Riding, argues: ‘‘ These animals opened up the country for people, you need to respect their history and their heritage. This hut was built in the 1880s, with dragged by horses out of the of the hill.
‘‘All these pretty little huts where the bushwalkers like to go and have their cups of tea, they were stockmen that built the bloody things so they could live there with their animals. The only reason the trails are still there is because the brumbies use them consistently.
‘‘Declaring the brumbies as ferals is a bit like going down to Australia’s famous Bondi beach lifesavers and saying ‘thanks mate, we’ve declared this wilderness, so get off’.’’
In 2000, NSW national parks tried to cull the brumbies using marksmen in helicopters. When the public saw images of some of the 606 brumbies dead or dying in the bush landscape, there was uproar. But at the Australian National University’s Fenner school of environment and society, academics, led by a protected area management specialist Graeme Worboys, gather to debate the issue. For them, it’s no-brainer: the horses need to go.
‘‘This is like the Great Barrier Reef, it’s like Kakadu, it’s a national heritage- listed property and Australian society has basically said we want to keep this very special part of Australia intact for the next generation and the generation after,’’ says Worboys.
Despite the emotion, there is common ground. All sides of the logs side debate agree the impact of wild horses on delicate alpine areas should be minimised. The argument is over how to do that.
Since 2004, 1,524 horses have been removed from the Alpine national park in Victoria and the Victorian government is preparing a draft wild horse management plan based on the advice of horse advocates, conservationists, animal welfare groups and national parks. It reached agreement on methods such as trapping and mustering horses for culling but could not reach unanimous agreement on aerial or ground shooting.
The NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service has just opened its own public consultation process that will inform its next wild horse management plan. Since 2002, it has removed more than 2,600 horses from the Kosciuszko national park through passive trapping, where horses voluntarily enter a yard. Of those, about onethird are rehomed. The rest are killed.
Dr David Freudenberger is a lecturer and researcher at the ANU’s Fenner school of environment and society and studies the lower Snowy river.
‘‘Part of the conundrum is that the horse is a stunning animal in the wrong place,’’ he says. ‘‘Every time I see a mob of horses up in that country, it is gobsmacking, but they are in the wrong place.’’