Daniel Andrews has defended a decision to cull feral horses that are causing ecological damage to Victoria’s fragile Alpine ecosystems, as protesters campaigning against the planned shooting massed on the steps of state parliament.
Parks Victoria plans to remove 500 horses from the eastern Alpine region this year as part of a feral horse management plan that includes the eventual removal of all horses from Barmah national park on the Murray River and from the Bogong high plains.
Last month Parks Victoria issued a tender for feral animal control.
The tender documents state that the contract is for ground shooting of “deer, feral pigs, goats, foxes and other species,” with feral horses to be the “primary target”. The contract would run until 30 June 2023 in the Alpine national park, including the eastern Alps and Bogong, and Barmah National Park.
The documents say that all shooting operations are to be discussed on a need-to-know basis, because of a “signifiant risk posed by feral horse activists”. Any leak of information about shooting operations will be seen as a breach of contract.
“Activists have gone to extreme measures to try and stop the control of feral horses including death threats to Parks Victoria staff, protests and threats to sabotage control operations.”
Parks Victoria refused to confirm any shooting plans, and says it does not release details about the timing and location of planned culls to protect the safety of its staff and contractors.
“There are large numbers of feral horses in the Alpine and Barmah national parks and the damage they cause is evident,” a spokesperson said. “Parks Victoria needs to respond to the current situation with the best techniques available.”
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There are an estimated 5,000 feral horses in the eastern alps, 600 in Barmah national park and 100 in the Bogong high plains, according to surveys conducted by Parks Victoria.
Andrews said the state government’s plan to control feral horses, which was revised last year, was humane and based on protecting national parks.
“If you care about biodiversity and if you care about the natural environment, that pristine environment is owned by every single Victorian … it will not be maintained if you’re overrun by feral animals,” the premier told reporters. “And we will not be spending millions and millions of dollars relocating them.”
The feral horse management plan states that some horses will be removed through passive trapping and rehoming, particularly in more accessible areas like Barmah national park.
But it says that the difficulty of trapping horses in remote areas of the eastern alps, combined with a shortage of people with the knowledge and capacity to train wild horses, meant it was “unlikely that capture and rehoming will contribute significantly to the required reduction in feral horse populations in the eastern Alps”.
Where rehoming cannot occur, it says, shooting either from the ground or aerial shooting will be considered.
Jill Pickering, the president of the Australian Brumby Alliance, said there were retrainers currently waiting for horses.
Pickering said that despite the rehoming policy, the government “defaults to shooting”. She denied that the science was settled on the damage feral horses cause to Australian ecosystems.
Wednesday’s protest also coincided with the state opposition announcing it would ban the culling of feral horses to focus on “rehoming and veterinary intervention,” a proposal that both animal welfare advocates and environmentalists say would not be able to handle the volume of horses that need to be removed from national parks.
The stance echoes a move by the New South Wales National party, who attempted to end the culling of feral horses in Kosciuszko national park by declaring them a heritage breed. In November the NSW government signed off on a plan to reduce feral horse numbers from more than 14,000 to 3,000, a number that conservationists said was still too high.
The Victorian opposition leader, Matthew Guy, said ending culling was both humane and sensible.
“This is not a new issue, this is going back to the Man from Snowy River and beyond,” he said. “We can re-school, rehome greyhounds, we should be able to do it with brumbies.”
Pro-brumby groups, including the Australian Brumby Alliance, have argued that horses should be trapped at a rate of about 200 a year, which would allow retrainers to keep up, and other population controls should be conducted via the use of fertility control drugs.
Both Parks Victoria and the RSPCA say that fertility control drugs are not a feasible option for a large and diverse feral horse population, particularly as they need to be re-administered after a few years.
Matt Ruchel from the Victorian National Parks Association said there was a world of difference between rehoming a greyhound, a low-energy dog bred by humans, to the knowledge and facilities required to retrain and rehome a feral horse.
“We don’t rehome wild dogs,” Ruchel said.
Ruchel said the Coalition’s policy was “disappointing” and that controlling feral horse numbers required a mix of approaches, including both rehoming and culling.
“There is simply not the demand [for rehomed brumbies] to control the numbers effectively,” he said.
Ruchel said calls by pro-brumby advocates for more research to determine the affects of feral horses on national parks was “just a delaying tactic”.
“There is decades of science highlighting this problem,” he said.
Mhairi Roberts from RSPCA Victoria said there were circumstances in which shooting, by skilled marksmen, was “more humane than other options”.
She said wild horses were very stressed by some capture methods and the process of being transported to rehomers, and there were thousands of non-feral horses in Victoria that also required homes.
“We are seeing high numbers of animal cruelty reports relating to horses, most related to neglect,” she said. “Based on those reports we think that the market is quite saturated already. We don’t think that there would be enough homes in the state for high numbers of feral horses.”
