Brumby damage: Deer the real culprit in alpine park, says ABA

Brumbies are being unfairly blamed for pugging and trampling of alpine bogs, which horse advocates say is due to wallowing deer.

Appealing argument: A deer in a wallow in the Alpine National Park, where the focus by Parks Victoria has been brumbies.

ADVOCATES for the protection of brumbies in Victoria’s alps have accused Parks Victoria of pinning the blame for environmental damage on horses, when they were outnumbered by deer by at least 400 to one.

“Parks Victoria says it has firm evidence that brumbies are causing the damage, when their own notes say it’s deer,” Australian Brumby Association president Jill Pickering said.

Parks Victoria’s own estimates put the number of horses in the Eastern Victorian Alps at 2350, with another 80-100 in the Bogong High Plains.

In contrast, the Victorian Government’s draft Deer Management Strategy estimates the population of sambar, fallow, red and hog deer at “between several hundred thousand up to one million or more”.

The draft strategy also warns deer pose “a significant risk to biodiversity, causing both direct and indirect impacts” with Sambar deer posing a threat to Alpine Sphagnum Bogs and associated fens.

Ms Pickering said the ABA wanted proper, peer-reviewed research into the true impact of horses, rather than Parks Victoria staff looking at a wallows and saying “it’s horses”.

She said the ABA had taken Parks Victoria to the Federal Court seeking an injunction against it implementing its 2018-21 Feral Horse Strategic Action Plan, which aims to remove all horses from the Bogong High Plains and cut the Eastern Victorian Alps population by 1200.

Ms Pickering said the legal bid was driven by the ABA’s desire to protect the heritage value of the wild horses, which she said had “an essential place in our history”.

The court case ran for five days last week, with Justice O’Bryan deferring his judgment until a later date.

The Weekly Times understands Parks Victoria has agreed to await the judgment before implementing its plan.

A Parks Victoria spokeswoman said the agency would not comment while the case was subject to judgment.

A study conducted by the Arthur Rylah Institute into feral horse damage on the Bogong High Plains states “feral horses are impacting on the environmental values of the Bogong High Plains, with stream bank damage, pugging, trampling of alpine bogs, dung deposition, widening or formation of tracks, creation of roll pits, creation of short-grazed turf, pulling of vegetation and general trampling”.

Research leaders Arn Tolsma and James Shannon said “care was taken to only record the impact obviously attributable to feral horses, as some activity was due to deer, and some bare areas may still have been due to a long history of cattle grazing on the plains”.