'They'll have an uprising on their hands': the fight to save wild horses | KonradMarshall GoodWeekendMag
It’s just after 8am on the Nunniong Plains in Victoria’s high country when professional horse-breaker Lewis Benedetti, atop a big grey thoroughbred named Stones, trots out of the bush leading a raggedy black foal on a rope.
As I stoke the coals and our eggs sizzle in popping bacon fat, it’s hard to argue. But there is, however, another more urgent reason Benedetti is here. He’s catching brumbies today not just for recreation but because of what might happen this winter. “Demography is destiny. Numbers are everything. And it’s going to get to the stage where – without culling – the problem is unsolvable,” says retired CSIRO botanist Dick Williams. The situation demands a dramatic correction, he says, quoting a maxim often attributed to British economist John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind.
On the issue of brumbies there’s no hysteria: merely a few points he wants to get off his chest. “They’ve bred up to the extent that theyoverpopulated,” Flannagan concedes. “No matter what the animal, you’ve gotta have a culling rate. But you do it.” Trap them, he says, and take them out of the park, even down to the knackery in nearby Maffra. Better that than leaving corpses in the bush for the wild dogs or feral pigs to eat.
Yet perhaps the biggest point of contention is the brumby population estimate, which was based on a 2019 aerial survey covering 7443 square kilometres of Victoria and NSW, and used statistical modelling to determine brumby density. Opponents believe such estimates are compromised – that the bushfires last summer would have dramatically thinned the population.
“The next generations, they too have a right, To a life riding free, same as us. Not to be lackeys and carry the bags, when the tourists arrive in a bus. I can tame a wild stallion or face a wild bull, I can handle a wild rushing mob. But arguing politics isn’t my game, I just can’t handle the job.”
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