We're told the numbers are enormous, told the environmental damage is catastrophic, told they have to be removed, and that lethal control is necessary. These things get repeated so often that so many people just nod their heads and accept what they’re being fed.

Every animal (with our species being the major outlier in the worst possible way) has an impact on the landscape. Thats nature for you. In Kosciusko, amongst the environmental statistics and combined with brumby impact, there is impact from a multitude of other introduced species and native species alike.

Other statistics of environmental impact are of weeds, predators, fires, droughts, floods, tourism, roads and infrastructure. The latter being the catalyst and the reason the government urges its minions to point their pitchforks at the brumbies, whose impact is not even comparable on that scale.

Sure, horses graze, they tread on vegetation, they use waterways and they can contribute to erosion and habitat disturbance. But proving that horses can cause “some” environmental damage is very different from proving exactly how much of the damage we're seeing in Kosciuszko is being caused by Brumbies alone.

If an ecosystem is being affected by a hundred different things at once, you cannot brush over the overall decline and point blame when there is no true statistical evidence.

The same goes for the population numbers.

The Brumby population is estimated using survey methods and statistical modelling. The numbers are estimates. That doesn’t seem very transparent to me.. especially when the price is compassion-less and brutal slaughter.

There needs to be clear, publicly accessible information that distinguishes between what they know, what they estimate, what evidence ‘suggests’ but is not proven, and what we cannot confidently separate from all the other variables.

The questions that should be answered are exactly how much impact do horses have as an independent species? How does that compare with all other environmental impacts? To what degree are native animals and vegetation actually affected by Brumbies alone? Is the evidence strong enough to justify mass population reduction? And why are alternative management plans not being considered?

And surely, once inhumane aerial culling becomes the “solution”, the standard of evidence and public transparency should become higher, not lower.

I honestly believe that if those questions were answered and put before the public, not one person could justify what is happening. But because of all the smoke screens, lack of transparency, lack of evidence and people just eating up what they are told, they are able to get away with it and keep doing it over and over.

Population estimates can be corrected and ecological models can be improved. If future research shows that damage by brumbies alone was minor after all, statistics can be altered.

But we won’t be able to bring back the hundreds of horses who were killed while they were figuring it out.