there's plenty of horses in australia without brumbies, just as in america. we don't need them there. i'd rather have native sheep, even with their health problems and interraction with domesticated species and have federal dollars spent on a federal species rather than the horses. go in, get the movie making horses out and be done with it. the flora hasn't had time to adapt to their powder creating hooves. in one sense it has, as native plants and distributions are disappearing. the metaphor i am using which i didnt' get to which you did, is that the government in the US wants it both ways. they want the public to pay for the nonsense to keep them wild, pay to have an auction or whatever to distribute them, then when the horse is past a rideable age, we can't send them to slaughter. so i say let them send them to slaughter rather than draw out the process. that way we can get rid of a useless infrastructure at the federal level that has no origination in the constitution for the feds to be bothering with. the federal government specializes in making it difficult for anything when they get involved because they have to make things more equal. i detest them more and more each day. i say if people want to preserve their history, preserve it, but not at the expense large fauna. same with the large kangaroos. they lost their predators and are taking over, but the feelgooders won't let a thinning there either because they can't eat one of their national symbols. it's difficult to understand displacing populations. in the carizza plains here in california, the nature conservancy got rid of some cattle. trouble was, when the did that, native fox, burrowing owls and a host of other species declined dramatically. we got rid of the split hoove herbivores too recently in the US ie, the bison, for the environment to adapt. we also introduced "improved" species in the form of noxious weeds and annual grasses, which only served to increase runoff, reduce feed, reduce diversity. cattle now serve the purpose that herds of elk, bison and other large animals served to rid the environment of high carbon to nitrogen buildup which doesn't get reduced well without disturbance. horses overdisturb, they came from rocky steppes where their feet woudln't damage fragile topsoil. we have selected against their rapid hoof growth and replaced it with mandated shoeing as we have taken out the foot of the horse. this was started by not having enough horses around that could withstand cobblestone travel and wah la, we needed better shoes. we got horses that were prettier with small feet that used less iron. we are rapidly going that way again with cutting horses. human just will not correct his mistakes or make his population static. we must fill the petri dish and reduce diversity. pretty soon we will have to eat our own crap and bodies to survive, ie soylent green. it would seem to me that one could take 90% of the brumbies and wild horses off the table and sterilize a good percentage of the rest and have a stable population so 10 people could go take pictures and put them in a calender once a year and make sure their numbers could be seen beneath their mane so we could all swoon how the lion is laying down with the lamb. or we could do just what comes "natural", knock down the fence and let them populate even more and let "nature" take over. the alternatives are less of them, let there be diversity. let both catch sterilize and release as well as catch and euthanize, as both systems have worked in cats and both solutions are basically useless, just ask the native birds and other predators a cat's size like kit foxes. oh but they are so cute.
