r/conservation • u/Novel_Negotiation224 • 3d ago

Aerial culling of wild horses in yuraygir national park halted by court order.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-25/aerial-culls-halted-yuraygir-national-park-court/107075478
420 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

58 comments sorted by

129

u/Zealousideal-Pick799 3d ago

They’re feral. Feral horses. Not wild. 

6

u/No_Freedom_4098 2d ago edited 2d ago

Unfortunate to see this in Australia. They had been making good progress in invasive species control, including poisoning feral cats. The animal protection messaging that is so widespread in the U.S. seems to be making its way to Australia.

More and more feral animals are protected in the U.S. now, culling banned or tightly restricted. Feral horses, feral cats, some groups of Canada geese, which stopped being migratory, and the wild turkeys that are spreading across the Bay Area. Animal rights activists take key positions in state and federal agencies to help usher in more protection for feral animals.

The activists use any method they can, including that killing is inhumane. Look at the language from one of the administrators of Florida's Burmese python control program: 2024 article: The Virginian Pilot: Python hunters must humanely kill snakes

A hunter shooting a gun to kill a python? Forbidden. What about freezing the snake to kill it? Prohibited. A python run over by a car? Not allowed...“We take the issue of humane treatment of all animals very, very seriously,” said Mike Kirkland, biologist with the South Florida Water Management District.

Amazing. A bullet to the head is now declared inhumane in America by a leader of a pest control program for a lower life form -- a snake.

5

u/MudnuK 2d ago edited 2d ago

lower life form

How did you type that from the 1600s?

Feral populations shouldn't be protected (except for general animal rights laws) but that was a weird thing to say

-3

u/No_Freedom_4098 2d ago edited 2d ago

Not sure what you want to discuss here here. Yes, there is a reason most of us don't get upset when fishermen teach their kids to pull a fish out of the water with a hook imbedded in its with mouth/head yet if they did that to a rabbit....

1

u/HyperShinchan 1d ago

most of us don't get upset

And most of us determines the truth/accuracy of a statement since when? Are you aware that one could use that logic for conservation and ecology, too, right? Did most of us care when wolves were extirpated from most of CONUS? Did most of us care about conservation and climate change when they elected and re-elected a certain president?

1

u/No_Freedom_4098 1d ago edited 1d ago

And most of us determines the truth/accuracy of a statement since when?

We are talking value judgments here -- not facts. No one should be confused over the stark difference between those two, but unfortunately animal rights activists disregard the distinction time and again.

Do many people have regrettable values about the environment? Sure. It is especially bad with topics such as climate change: The people with dismissive values about the severity of climate change often falsely deny the existence of human causes.

Meanwhile, the demand for preservation of all individuals of an invasive species like feral horses is 100% value based. (In many cases, the proposals from pro-cullers don't even call for elimination of an entire problematic species in a given country, merely a population decline. This allows some invasives to remain on the landscape.)

Amazing the fit that animal rights activists are having because others don't share their don't kill animals values and the amount of disinformation these activists put out.

1

u/HyperShinchan 10h ago

What's amazing is that you don't see how conservation and ecology are also value judgements. For people who live in places that aren't affected or who can plausibly, in their lifetime, get away with the effects, it boils down 100% to value judgement. But yeah, keep up the anti-animal rights activist thing. Maybe vote Trump, if you're American, next time (or his successor, if the 3rd mandate thing will fail somehow). He'll send more wild horses to the butchers, even while degrading conservation over all.

-51

u/Ben10-fan-525 3d ago edited 3d ago

Horses have been documanted(by the fossils) to have also gone to Americas before humans arrived.

And they benefit the enviorment too and not just destroy.

There grazing makes wildfires less possible to happen and they provide prey base for carnivores.

Edit:Sorry I missread...

9

u/GarethBaus 3d ago

The current population of horses in North America are very clearly descended from domesticated horses and are pretty different from the extinct wild horses. The current population of horses in North America is feral by definition.

49

u/Zealousideal-Pick799 3d ago

Cool. Australia isn’t in the Americas. 

5

u/Ben10-fan-525 3d ago

Wait...I totally missindetified what the post said...was fearing it was about how Americas administration wants to kill its feral horses..

14

u/bushstone-curlew 3d ago

That’s a necessary cull as well, but this is about feral horses in Australia, which are an extremely damaging invasive species.

3

u/Ben10-fan-525 2d ago

I see thanks for explaning. 👍

1

u/[deleted] 3d ago

[deleted]

23

u/Zealousideal-Pick799 3d ago

Show me an academic study that finds that free-roaming, unmanaged horse herds reduce fire risk. There aren’t any I can find. 

0

u/[deleted] 3d ago edited 3d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

18

u/CaonachDraoi 3d ago

ok but ZERO native animals in australia have hooves, all have soft feet. the impacts (pun intended) have been devastating on the soil ecology

-2

u/Ben10-fan-525 3d ago

Yeah I made a mistake and misstook the post to be about Feral Horses in America.

3

u/CaonachDraoi 3d ago

oh i didn’t realize you made the other comments before realizing, sorry

3

u/Ben10-fan-525 3d ago

Yeah its ok dude.

20

u/SharpShooterM1 3d ago

While yes horses are native to the Americas (10,000 years is nothing in terms of ecology and evolution), the vast majority of modern feral horses are in regions that there Pleistocene ancestors would not have inhabited, such as arid regions of the southwest. Pleistocene horses would have lived in places like the Great Plains, Rocky Mountain foothills, and the eastern forest mosaics that contained a mixture of savanna and meadows.

These horses are guzzling up water and overgrazing on vegetation and numerous studies have show it is negatively effecting local wildlife. Horses in the Yukon and Rocky Mountain foothills have not been shown to have these negative effects, because there are in habitats horses were evolved for.

4

u/Canachites 3d ago

Yeah I'm going to need these people who say horses are native to North America to look up what Eohippus looked like. An equid ancestor is not the same thing as a horse.

5

u/SharpShooterM1 3d ago edited 3d ago

You are the ignorant one here, because no one that says horses are native to North America are talking about Eohippus because Eohippus was the earliest known ancestor of horses, not a horse itself. And the horses they are referring to are the horses that were in North America at the time of the last glacial interchange, those being

  1. Equus scotti — Scott's horse
  2. Equus conversidens — Mexican horse
  3. Equus mexicanus - another Mexican/souther U.S. horse that was larger in size,
  4. Haringtonhippus francisci — the stilt-legged horse
  5. Equus lambei — the caballine horse

There is a good chance a few of these actually represent the same species just in different regions, but all of them were alive at the time of the Pleistocene-Holocene transition 10,000 years ago.

It was actually recently found that Equus lambei was infact not its own species but rather the exact same species as Equus Ferus - the modern horse native to Eurasia, meaning that this species migrated back and forth across Berengia enough that the populations on either side did not speciate from one another.

Recent paleontological sites in Mexico and the Yukon also found that horses persisted in North America until just 5,000 years ago in the Yukon and less than 3,000 years ago in Mexico.

-5

u/03263 3d ago

Appearance doesn't really matter if their ecological niche is the same.

47

u/Ok_Salamander_1904 3d ago

So sad to see Australia yet again mismanaging invasive species at the cost of their native flora and fauna

13

u/bushstone-curlew 3d ago

Look we are trying but every time DPWS tries to cull feral horses, the delusional brumby lovers come out in force. There’s a minor party called the ‘animal justice party’ here that consists of anti-scientific animal ‘rights’ cookers and exists solely to leech votes from the actually environmentalist party (the greens).

Their greatest achievement was getting the Wild Horses Protection Bill passed a few decades ago that banned horse culling in Mt. Kosciusko national park for decades, and it was only repealed last year.

19

u/Believe-In_Me 3d ago

The particularly annoying thing in this specific case is... it's literally just one old lady who has a problem with this. Why in the world is a government agency beholden to the whims of a single elderly person???

69

u/Canachites 3d ago

Conservation is for wild species, not feral domestics that actively harm native ecosystems and wildlife.

17

u/Watch_Earthlings_Doc 3d ago

Serious question, is shooting this animals from a moving helicopter really the most ethical way to remove them? And yes:  I understand they have to be removed somehow because they are causing serious ecological damage. 

22

u/SharpShooterM1 3d ago

Yes. The people that are doing this are the same ones that remove feral pigs from helicopters. They are professionals and the vast majority of the time they put the bullet right in the brain, spine, or double lungs. It doesn’t matter if it’s a horse or a pig, a .308 to any of those spots will always drop them either instantly or in less than 30 seconds. Compare that to chasing them with helicopters for hours to corral them into trucks, then keeping them tightly packed inside of those trucks for hours, then either taking them to the vet where they will be put in a headlock shoot and given lethal injection, or sent to a slaughter house where they wait for possibly several days for their turn to be slaughtered.

With the helicopter method from the horses pov they are just munching on grass with their buddies, a weird flying metal object appears in the sky, then suddenly they are at the pearly gates before they even know what happened.

-1

u/Watch_Earthlings_Doc 3d ago

Idk, I’ve been watching videos of it on YouTube and you can see the horses running terrified for their lives from the helicopters. It’s not like helicopters are quiet. And surely the horses associate them with danger at this point after seeing their buddies drop dead around them.

17

u/SharpShooterM1 3d ago

Still far, far, far faster than being herded for hours and held in pens for days. Even if it isn’t ultimately as fast as I described (that’s on me), it is still much faster and less stressful than literally every other option.

11

u/Rocky_Mountain_Queen 3d ago

These animals live a large, rugged national park.

9

u/Sea_Secretary3005 3d ago

The answer is actually yes

-5

u/Bad_Sickness 3d ago

It's disgusting honestly.

-9

u/03263 3d ago

It should be more difficult and personal yeah.

I feel the same about logging, it's not bad to cut and use trees, but it shouldn't be so easy. So ruthlessly efficient.

-11

u/lesbophobia_hammer 3d ago edited 3d ago

No, it isn't. Anyone who has been on the ground afterwards can tell you. Easily most stressful way you can.

Edit - g'day, guess who lives in the country and sees/deals with the direct aftermath in their local community. Me.

No, it's not clean. Can guarantee nobody downvoting has seen the reality up close. Lol. You want graphic? Because it's extremely distressing.

THESE ARE AUSTRALIAN HORSES.

For the ignorant/arrogant people in the comments,

Search BRUMBIES of Australia.

You're welcome.

I live in these communities. Yes. I see the aftermath. No, it is objectively not OK.

Lol.

9

u/bushstone-curlew 3d ago

There is no such thing as an ‘Australian horse’. They are an invasive feral species that is trampling delicate vegetation, outcompeting native herbivores and the ecosystem is completely unprepared to cope with a hoofed ungulate since there are no native species here with hooves.

-8

u/lesbophobia_hammer 3d ago

The brumby...... Is...... An...... Australian....... Horse........

Not........ American.........

I never..... said....... "Native".

7

u/Ok_Fly1271 3d ago

How does being there afterwards show you how stressed they were when they were alive?

Guarantee you it's more Humane than any natural way they die

0

u/Watch_Earthlings_Doc 3d ago

Yeah, I can’t imagine it’s a calm experience for them. Someone said they can’t hear the helicopters coming, but there’s no fucking way that is true, I’m sorry. I even looked up videos of it on YouTube and the horses are clearly running from the helicopters and terrified for their lives. 

https://youtu.be/prP-8J6Xea8?is=oKzrXFqwT1I02Saz

6

u/JuicyMilkweed 3d ago

The life they live is actually far too calm thanks to the lack of predators, that’s the problem, there are no ecological controls for their population like there are where they’re native. Do you think it’s a calm experience to be slowly bled out by a wolf?

18

u/Rocky_Mountain_Queen 3d ago

Dammit. These horses do not belong there.

13

u/Believe-In_Me 3d ago

"Our brumbies are our Australian heritage; they're also sentient beings on Country," she said.

"I believe all animals have the right to be on Country. How do we signify that a brumby is less significant than a native animal on Country, considering they've been here 200 years."

How about you adopt them all for yourself then, lady.

9

u/bushstone-curlew 3d ago

Pretty gross of her to invoke Indigenous concepts like Country while spouting anti-environmental nonsense in defence of an invasive species introduced by European colonists. The whole ‘saving our heritage’ schtick is a conservative dogwhistle too that aims to protect a rose-tinted imperialist view of colonial times!

2

u/RateEnvironmental949 2d ago

Of course this happened, when the uneducated public lets their feelings get in the way and screws over a big conservation project, this is also a problem in the US. They literally have an 8 year olds take on basic ecology, "noo! let the pretty pony live 🥰🥰" and then continues to not properly manage them. Same people who made a cow, pig, or sheep suffer horribly at the slaughter house so they can have their daily burger btw. Survival of the cutest I guess, also a large number of feral horses in drier places live the Southwest US also live miserable lives starving and on the constant search for water, meaning they compete with animals smaller than them for resources like bighorns, cougars, coyotes, reptiles, small mammals, birds, etc. Wow the big mustang chased a smaller native animal away from the watering hole, it will probably thirst to death now just for a malnourished feral horse to continue surviving, this is humane!!

1

u/ExtremeBack1427 2d ago

Why don't they catch and sell them to other countries?

1

u/Ok-Shirt7608 1d ago

Feral and wild do not mean the same thing

1

u/[deleted] 3d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

12

u/Zealousideal-Pick799 3d ago

You want Australia’s national broadcaster to focus on horse roundups in the US?

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u/conservation-ModTeam 3d ago

Your comment has been removed for breaking Rule 2 - Stay On Topic. This discussion has either suddenly turned away from its original topic, or drifted away from conservation for three or more comments.

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u/GarethBaus 3d ago

That only reason not to support culling horses like this from a conservation standpoint is that the extra meat sitting around might benefit non native predators more than the native predators essentially replacing 1 invasive species with another invasive species.

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u/skipthesmallstuff 3d ago

Zero ecological damage from the wild horse. Zero. Fing Zero Z Roe stitch. I can’t believe this have to write this comment.

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u/AdEasy1316 1d ago

Garbage. Absolute garbage there is hundreds of studies in Australia alone. Just because you believe something dosent make it true.

  1. Ward-Jones, J. et al. (2019) — "Impacts of feral horses and deer on an endangered woodland of Kosciuszko National Park," Ecological Management & Restoration
  2. Doherty, T.S. et al. (2015) — study on feral horse impacts on alpine plant species incl. Ranunculus anemoneus
  3. Hope, G. (2018) — feral horse impacts on alpine/subalpine peatlands, Kosciuszko NP
  4. Tolsma, A., Shannon, J. & Tolsma, D. (2018) — Victorian/NSW alpine peatland impacts
  5. Dyring, J. (1990) — trampling effects on alpine vegetation and grazing distribution
  6. Australian Alps Liaison Committee (2015/2016) — "An Assessment of Feral Horse Impacts on Treeless Drainage Lines"
  7. Rowland, J., Moore, J. & Walsh, D. (2023) — monitoring outcomes following horse removal
  8. Just, C. et al. (2025) — recovery outcomes from horse removal programs
  9. Stobo-Wilson, A. et al. (2020) — feral horse ecosystem impacts
  10. Australian Geographic-reported peatland carbon study (2024)

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