19,000 Australian brumbies are being cruelly culled

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This is a cross post. And I am expressing my opinion on this news story, please note, as I feel I must. It’s an important story for people concerned with animal welfare. It’s an important story for people concerned about protecting animals from cruelty. And it is sad to report that the Australian authorities are experts in animal cruelty and in causing pain and suffering to wild animals.

They feel they have the right to do it. Does any human have the right to cause pain and suffering to animals for whatever objective? The objective of the Australian authorities is to protect their native species. Laudable but please do it in a more humane way.

In this instance, they have decided to protect the habitat of their native species which is shared by brumbies; Australia’s wild horse living over large tracts of the Kosciuszko National Park in an area described as the southern Australian Alps; an area where on this arid continent there is regular winter snows. It’s an ideal place for these wild horses which were imported into Australia with English settlers hundreds of years ago. The park is within the boundaries of New South Wales.

The horses have been immortalised in literature and in verse such as by the Bush poet Banjo Paterson who wrote “The Man from Snowy River”, published in 1890.

There are about 22,000 wild horses in Australia living in this national park and the NSW authorities want to reduce that number to 3,000. So far more than 5,000 horses had been shot. They are left where they die.

The way they are shooting them is, for me, shocking and destined to certainly cause cruelty. These are marksmen in helicopters carrying .308 rifles aimed at the head and bodies of these horses in effort to try and kill them humanely which is laughable because it is entirely impossible to kill horses humanely employing this method.

And you don’t have to rely on me to make that assessment because it’s been done for me. Official figures from a trial cull using this method of 270 horses indicated that some were shot up to 15 times and on average it took seven bullets to kill the horse. Think about that; seven bullets! This is mass cruelty on a gargantuan scale to add to the mass cruelty in the shooting of hundreds of thousands of feral cats on that continent.

And note that this was a trial so the authorities knew that there would be mass animal cruelty before embarking on the cull.

This mass slaughter is the culmination of campaigning for many years by conservationists. They argue, as mentioned, that the brumbies are destroying the habitat of native species and therefore they have to be reduced in numbers. But Australia’s conservationists don’t mind how they kill animals and it is certainly not humanely and they are pitted against people who live in the southern Australian Alps; who share the landscape with the horses.

They say that they are part of the country’s heritage and that there is a “cultural and spiritual connection with the land and the horses”. Those are the words of Peter Cochrane, 79, who believes that this culling is a betrayal of the animals that helped found modern Australia.

This week the National Park where they live has been closed to the public and park rangers have guarded entry roads to the interior of this 2700 mi² wilderness to allow marksmen in helicopters to engage in this mass and cruel slaughter out of the prying eyes of the public who might be shocked if they knew what was going on.

The government of New South Wales is behind the cull and they want to do it humanely but, laugh, this is anything but humane. This method is diametrically opposed to the concept of humane euthanasia. It is yet another example of animal cruelty perpetrated by the various states of Australia at various times.

My thanks to The Times newspaper.

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