“The whole world is watching and outraged,” states Anne Novak, Executive Director of Protect Mustangs based in California. “Killing Australia’s heritage wild horses is shameful and needs to stop now!”
Special thanks to Libby Lovegrove and Lynette Sutton with boots on the ground across Australia working hard to save the brumbies.
“The global public is outraged that Australia would condone mass killings of wild horses. Are they killing off thousands of horses so they can frack the land for oil and natural gas? We ask that the heinous killings cease immediately.” ~Anne Novak, Executive Director of Protect Mustangs.
An aerial cull of wild horses is taking place in the Kimberley
The Aboriginal Lands Trust has begun an aerial cull of thousands of feral horses in the Kimberley.
A survey of Lake Gregory and the Billiluna Pastoral Station two months ago found about 6,000 feral horses.
The Trust says the animals are a risk to the environment and public health, and to comply with the law they have to go.
The Trust says an aerial cull is the most humane way to do that and has employed shooters in helicopters.
A plan to cull feral horses in the same area in 2010 was abandoned after a backlash from animal welfare advocates.
The state Opposition’s Lisa Baker has called for the cull to stop immediately.
“There’s babies, there’s foals whose mothers are shot who starved to death,” she said.
“This is not a civilised way of managing a population of horses.”
Ms Baker says traditional owners want to manage feral horse populations in other ways.
“They’re really cognisant of the fact that some of them will need to be euthanised, put down, whatever, but there is many opportunities for tourism, for breaking the horses in, and for using them more productively,” she said.
The Aboriginal Lands Trust says traditional owners have been consulted.
The area’s former Indigenous Protected Area co-ordinator, Wade Freeman, says other options were considered and ruled out.
“Too costly and not humane at all,” he said.
“We even tried the option of darting and putting horses to sleep but when you’re looking at numbers of up to 10,000 it’s just not viable.”