Thursday, 4 May 2023

Wild horse control

Bev McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (22:10): (189) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Environment – I am so pleased she is in the house – and concerns Parks Victoria’s implementation of the Barmah Strategic Action Plan, released in February 2020, which includes a program designed to ultimately eradicate the population of wild horses in the national park. Page 42 notes:

The first stage, over the four-year duration of this plan, aims to reduce horse numbers down to a population of approximately 100 horses …

Page 32 says:

The feral horse population will be surveyed annually … to track population numbers.

Yet we have no evidence of this happening. There has been no release of any number count since 2019 – more than three years ago, Minister – yet the removals continue. The one-in-100-year flood devastated the brumby population, with a significant number drowned, starved or euthanised. Some horses have been rehomed by Parks and the flood incident control centre. Others have been disposed of through removal and shooting operations – contracted to a knackery, no less. The strategic plan was bad enough, but it is completely unacceptable for Parks to break their commitment to publishing the survey numbers and to continue removals despite the collapse of the population to levels far below those outlined in the agreed document. So the action I seek from the minister, for the sake of public trust, is the immediate publication of each year’s survey data, a post-flood population estimate and an explanation of how the management plan has been adapted since the floods.

I also request an explanation on the methodology used in the aerial surveys, given the reasonable questions raised about the accuracy of helicopter line transect sampling and the Distance software. This is a system which, in various mammal populations across Australia, has produced widely varying estimates from year to year, including in the case of horses some increases which vastly exceed the animal’s biological ability to reproduce. To be balanced, I should add that in other years it has shown collapses in population with no observable reason. In short, it seems reasonable to carefully scrutinise this methodology, particularly when you examine the results of the eastern alps aerial survey published last year, which estimates a population density per square kilometre of 1.32 horses but at the same time and in the same area claims 1.34 wild cattle and 0.32 deer. Can we really believe there is such a large wild cattle population and, more to the point, four times as many horses as deer?