Conservationists have joined the pro-brumby lobby in calling on the New South Wales government to take action to reduce the number of horrific collisions between cars and feral horses in Kosciuszko national park.
But while brumby supporters have called for a reduction in speed limits and more warning signs, conservationists say the only way to reduce the risk is to reverse laws banning the large-scale culling of feral horses.
Documents released through freedom-of-information laws show there were four crashes between horses and cars in the Kiandra area of the Snowy Mountains highway alone last year, compared with six in 2017 and three each in 2016 and 2015.
The figures were contained in an email released by the National Parks and Wildlife Service, but a spokesman from the Office of Environment and Heritage said it had no reports of collisions with horses in the past 12 months.
The documents, obtained by the environment group Reclaim Kosci, include a memo about a crash in September 2018 when a driver, travelling 20km/h below the speed limit, rounded a bend and struck a horse that was standing in the middle of the road.
The horse rolled over the bonnet and put its head through the windscreen, denting the roof, crushing the passenger side of the vehicle and causing the driver to veer off the road.
The horse was severely injured and the driver told rangers it was making “distress calls” while surrounded by other horses for two hours before police arrived and shot it. The driver was “extremely lucky not to have been killed”, the memo said.
Reclaim Kosci said the crash data provided another reason to curb feral horse numbers in the park, on top of concerns from scientists about environmental damage to sensitive wetlands and bogs.
The roadside trapping program is still in place but trapping has not been carried out since August 2017. Conservationists are concerned that even though the parks authority still has the authority to trap, policy uncertainty created by new laws asserting the heritage and cultural values of Snowy Mountains brumbies will stymie attempts at brumby population control.
Another crash report from 2012 said rangers were told of a foal that had been injured after being hit by a car, but had “already been euthanised by someone using a large rock to the back of the head” by the time rangers arrived.
“If you go to the park and drive through there you will see hundreds of horses and nothing else, all day,” Reclaim Kosci coordinator Alison Swain said.
A 2019 feral horse population survey, due later this year, is expected to show a significant increase from the 6,000 horses recorded in a 2014 survey.
An informal annual count, conducted by NPWS to give an indication of changes to the brumby population, showed a 450% increase from 2008 to 2018.
Swain said she had seen “dozens of horses along the road”, both alive and roadkill, and that population control was the “only feasible option” to reduce the crash risk.
The pro-horse Snowy Mountain Brumby Sustainability and Management Group has been lobbying the Berejiklian government since 2017 for a reduced speed limit, saying in a recent Facebook post that it was concerned the collisions would be used by Reclaim Kosci and others who do not want feral horses in the national park to justify a cull.
The new feral horse management plan is expected to rely on rehoming and relocating brumbies but the drafting process has not yet begun.
If the new management plan relies on moving horses to different areas of the national park it could trigger a federal environmental review under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Act, according to legal advice obtained by the Invasive Species Council.
The federal law would be triggered only if something was actively done to increase brumby population in a way that affected a threatened species or community. Mere inaction, by not controlling the population, is not sufficient to trigger a federal review even if it allows significant damage to occur.
The chief executive of the Invasive Species Council, Andrew Cox, said moving the horses would only spread the harm they were causing.
“There are high conservation values all through the park so it’s going to be very difficult to find any place where the horses can be moved in where they are not going to cause significant damage,” Cox said.
