Andrew Rule: Brumby cull necessary, but feral horses are easy targets
Bleeding hearts would do right to remember that wild Brumbies are feral animals wrecking the environment, but they’re not the only culprits, writes Andrew Rule.
Andrew Rule
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The showbiz maxim “never work with kids or animals” is no joke. It’s based on the human weakness for “cuteness”.
It applies in politics, too. Politicians go from baby-kissers to baby-killers when they’re forced to make commonsense laws about animals.
Blame showbiz. Films not only exploit sentimental attitudes, they form them.
“Don’t shoot Bambi” is part of the language. Disney’s celluloid fawn no doubt subtly influenced the attitudes that allow feral deer to infest millions of hectares of forest.
Eliminating one of Australia’s greatest pests, the rabbit, was easier before Watership Down. And Babe made life harder for anyone involved with pigs.
Babe is about as real as Donald Duck but try telling that to anyone who saw it at an impressionable age. The ugly reality is that millions of feral pigs are helping millions of cane toads, mynas, rabbits, foxes, deer, cats, dogs, goats, camels and horses to wreck the environment.
These are not cute Babes or Bambis. They are the wrong animals in the wrong place, invasive species pushing endangered natives to extinction.
All of which is background to the debate about eradicating brumbies, as the State Government is determined to do.
A brumby is a feral animal. They are in every state in every type of country, but in the eastern alpine area they have run wild since the late 1800s.
Over time, they have become more inbred and physically inferior. Bleak mountain winters, poor feed, and generations of stallions impregnating their own daughters and granddaughters produce the sort of sad specimens that make “brumby” a damning description among people who know horses. There are exceptions but the point stands.
Australians have always been keen on horses, something probably inherited from British and Irish forebears who used the animal but did not eat it, unlike other Europeans.
Banjo Paterson elevated “wild bush horses” to iconic status with his great galloping rhyme, The Man From Snowy River.
Elyne Mitchell did a Bambi with her best-selling book The Silver Brumby, which gave feral horses a wonderful press for half a century. Then smart film makers turned Paterson’s poem into a hit.
All of which makes it hard for conservationists to convince the public that brumbies should be eradicated — because it’s so easy for a ragtag alliance of strange bedfellows to exploit all those sentimental cues.
On one side is the cold logic of conservationist science. On the other are the shrill protests of the other sort of greens: Brigitte Bardot crazy cat ladies and inner-suburban vegans who insist no animal should die except of old age in intensive care.
Feral animals are bad for Australia. But brumbies are not the worst of them — just easier targets than others.
The Mountain Cattlemen’s Association of Victoria has quietly ignored theatrical plans by activists to muster Bogong brumbies to save them from shooting. But it warns that the government risks alienating too many people by aiming to totally eliminate brumbies in Victoria.
Better, it says, to cull old stallions and mares regularly, sell or donate some weanlings to brumby lovers and leave only the best young horses in the bush to maintain a few heritage mobs. The millions of dollars saved could be diverted to getting rid of deer, pigs, wild dogs and cats. But that, of course, might be too hard.
They shoot horses, don’t they? They do because it’s easier.
Andrew Rule is a Sunday Herald Sun columnist.