Barmah Brumbies still under attack despite parliament ordering a stop on culling
By Aaron Cordy
There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around.
That the colt from old Regret had got away and had joined the wild bush horses – so he was shot at night by poachers as the illegal culling of Brumbies continues to happen in Barmah National Park.
While there is a Strategic Action Plan (SAP) to relocate the wild Brumbies from Barmah Forest and Alpine National Park, the reality is the former Andrews Government and Parks Victoria have little interest in investing the time and resources to follow through on SAP. Instead, they have actively turned a blind eye to the shootings or maliciously orchestrated them by hiring contract hunters to go into the forest and shoot the brumbies at night.
August last year the Victoria Parliament ordered the Labor Government to stop their extermination of the brumby population, by passing a motion in the Legislative Council of the Parliament, with Coalition MPs and crossbench MPs voting in favour of cancelling the aerial and ground shooting of brumbies.
The motion drew attention to the Government’s failure to adhere to its management plan which included publishing updated population counts and rehoming the wild horses. Yet a year later what was an abhorrently open slaughter campaign against the brumbies has now been moved to the cover of dark.
The number of brumbies in the Barmah area also seems to have declined in the wake of last year’s floods according to locals, but the estimated 540 horses in the SAP already appeared to have been an exaggeration to inflate the numbers and push an agender to kill part of Australia’s heritage.
Where the debate gets confusing on the front of Parks Victoria is their claim to want to keep and protect the natural environment of the Barmah wetlands, but in their list of feral animals is the eastern grey kangaroo. An animal so native to Australia it is on the coat of arms. Parks Victoria has no plans to cull kangaroos, nor have they assessed the impact a strong mob can have on the area, as they are only focused on brumbies. A study that blatantly ignores elements that affect the outcomes of their findings is not only abhorrently incorrect but morally wrong when you are using these findings to mass kill animals.
In the end, the issue is preserving the native flora and fauna, but littering a national park with dead horses can only harm the ecosystem. An abundance of rotting corpses will be chum in the water to more dangerous pests like feral pigs, foxes, dogs and cats, which already has a destructive effect on native wildlife. Once these primal feeding machines have run out of horse offal to scavenge, they will turn on the local wildlife and the risk of animal extinction in the area will be far more difficult to mitigate.
