Their ancestors were brought here by people. They carried us, worked for us, helped us travel through and build this country, and became part of Australian history. Some escaped, some were released, and generations later their descendants learned to survive without us.

And now we call them the problem.

People made the original decision to bring horses into this landscape. Changed the landscape around them. Introduced countless other species, built roads, towns, dams and infrastructure, cleared enormous areas of habitat and fundamentally altered Australian ecosystems.

But now, descendants of those people are looking at the descendants of those horses and saying they dont deserve to be here, and that they deserve to be brutally slaughtered.

How does that make sense?

Brumby populations can be managed where their numbers or impacts require it. But how can the go-to method be shooting then rather than sterilisation or rehoming?

As of 30 June 2026, NSW Government figures show that 10,012 horses had been removed from Kosciuszko since November 2021. Of those, 6,673 were killed through aerial shooting, another 1,156 through ground shooting, and 1,259 were rehomed.

How accurate those numbers are is anyone's guess, considering the recorded population of ~3000 in 2025 magically became a population of ~10000 in 2026...

But despite that..

I struggle with the idea that the responsibility of humans somehow ends at calling them "feral" and thinking they can be as inhumane as they like because of that label.

Our ancestors created this situation. We inherited it from the generations before us, and now we have to decide what kind of management we're prepared to hand to the generations after us.

Whatever anyone chooses to call them now, Brumbies, wild horses, feral horses.. none of those labels change the fact that they are living, feeling animals who have walked beside us through history, and dealing with circumstances HUMANS created FOR them.

We owe their descendants more than deciding they are now inconvenient and showing them indescribable cruelty.

We owe them responsible management.

We owe them continued research into better alternatives.

We owe it to them to accept them as a part of the land they helped us create.

And above all, we owe them every effort to make any and all management as humane as we possibly can.