NSW government adopts aerial shooting to reduce feral horse numbers in Koscisuzko

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Aerial culling of feral horses will resume in the Kosciuszko National Park as part of an NSW government plan to manage growing numbers. The NSW government need to reduce numbers to 3000 by 2027 by law.

Transcript

00:00 The NSW Government has now made the call that they will use aerial shooting as one available

00:08 control method to manage wild horses in Kosciuszko National Park in the NSW Snowy Mountains.

00:15 It was back in August that the State's Environment Minister Penny Sharp originally raised the

00:19 idea that she would amend the current Kosciuszko wild horse management plan and propose to

00:25 use aerial shooting as an available control method to try to reduce the species numbers

00:30 to 3,000 by 2027.

00:32 To give some perspective, it was actually a survey conducted in November 2022 that found

00:37 that more than 18,000 horses remained in the park and Penny Sharp has said that the numbers

00:42 are just exploding and the current control methods are just not working to try and achieve

00:47 that goal of 3,000.

00:49 So other control methods include ground mustering and trapping, there's ground shooting as well

00:55 as efforts to re-home the animals but it's just not enough to try and get the species

00:59 down to 3,000.

01:01 So today the NSW Government has officially adopted that proposal, they will now aerial

01:07 shoot wild horses in Kosciuszko National Park in order to achieve that goal.

01:11 Here's what Penny Sharp had to say earlier today.

01:14 Parks has been working very hard on trying to reduce the numbers over the last few years

01:18 since the plan was put in place.

01:20 What became clear though is there is no way we were going to meet the 3,000 target by

01:26 2027 with the current methods that we have.

01:30 The current methods include re-homing which we're putting a lot of time and effort into

01:34 and people do have Brumbies and they take them and they're raising them on their properties.

01:41 We also have ground trapping and we have ground shooting.

01:44 It's a very difficult terrain in Kosciuszko National Park, it's a wilderness area, it's

01:49 very large.

01:50 What has become clear though is that the number of horses are too large and they're doing

01:55 significant damage to the park.

01:58 Now the management of wild horses has been under a lot of debate over the years.

02:03 We know that there are pro-Brumbie groups out there that are concerned about the animal

02:09 welfare issue of aerial shooting but the NSW Government says today that it is a humane

02:14 control method, it can be done right with appropriately trained professional shooters

02:21 and that they did receive over 11,000 public submissions in regards to this proposal and

02:26 that over 80% of them that did comment on the aerial shooting proposal actually expressed

02:33 support for it.

02:34 So Penny Sharp did reveal today that there seems to be a bit of a shift in public sentiment

02:39 in supporting aerial shooting in order to get those numbers down to a sustainable population.

02:44 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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