I AM just a simple person but it seems to me that the people who are pro-aerial culling of the Brumbies either haven't seen an aerial cull, are chasing votes or chasing money to fund their idealistic organisations. I don't want to see Kosciuszko National Park (KNP) become a park full of the bleached bones of wild horses and known internationally as the horse graveyard. There is a very good reason the aerial culling of wild horses was banned after the Guy Fawkes slaughter where horses were shot in the stomachs, shoulders, jaws, necks and legs and some left to suffer for many days. And if you believe the same thing isn't happening in KNP then you are dreaming. If you have never seen an aerial cull then I highly recommend you watch the footage and see if you still believe it's a humane death. My way of thinking is, if you wouldn't do it to a domestic animal then you don't do it to a wild animal, they feel pain just the same way. As far as I am aware the native animals and plants have lived side by side with the Brumbies without issue for many years before the park became a park. Blaming the horses for the effects of fungal disease and climate change isn't going to help anything. Kill all the horses and the disease and climate change will still be there. Saying it's a non-Indigenous thing wanting to preserve the presence of Brumbies in KNP I think can be seen as a little shortsighted. Let's not forget the many Indigenous expert Brumby horsemen and wranglers who were rightly proud of their skills and made the horses a part of their culture. I have spent whole days, from sunup to dusk, in the northern end of the park. What I saw was very little horse damage, multitudes of wildflowers and native grasses along with the unfortunate results of humans in the form tyre tracks and discarded rubbish. In one whole day recently I saw less than 30 wild horses in an area that is supposed to hold thousands. Where were the thousands? If there was 23,000 as some claim I would have been surrounded by them. Pretty telling when you have to use binoculars to find any of them. If the numbers being toted by the government are right then I need new glasses! Hiding behind the word 'science' does not in any way justify cruelty or human greed. Science is not infallible, when you read a scientist saying that herbivore animals are cannibals then you know to take every bit of science with a grain of salt! Denise Osborne Cooma
