The removal of feral horses from the Australian Alps can resume after Parks Victoria won a legal challenge to its plans to manage the invasive species.
The Australian Brumby Alliance had challenged plans to remove feral horses that have overrun the Bogong high plains and eastern Victorian Alps within the Australian Alps national parks.
The federal court had been asked to consider whether removal of horses should have been referred to the federal environment minister because they were part of the cultural heritage of that region.
On Friday the court ruled against the alliance and ordered it to pay Parks Victoria’s costs.
The court’s judgment found removal of feral horses from the Bogong high plains and Eastern alps was unlikely “to have a significant impact on the National Heritage values of the Australian Alps”.
Feral horses are a pest species that threaten native plants and animals by grazing, trampling vegetation and habitat, and damaging waterways.
But there have been attempts to protect the “heritage value” of the horses, most notably from the New South Wales government, which last year introduced laws to protect Snowy Mountains brumbies for cultural reasons.
A survey for the NSW and Victorian governments found the feral horse population in Australia’s alpine parks had more than doubled over five years, with conservationists blaming a lack of management of feral horses in NSW for the soaring numbers.
In the aftermath of the bushfire crisis it has become more urgent to control feral pest populations, which pose an even greater threat to species after fire.
The Victorian government had originally planned to trap and rehome horses where possible and to humanely euthanise those it could not rehome.
It now plans to introduce ground shooting as one of its control measures. The parks have been burnt, and culling was already being used to manage feral pigs, deer and goats after the fires.
In a statement on Friday afternoon, Parks Victoria said the legal action had meant the agency had been forced to suspend the majority of its work to control feral horse populations over the past 18 months.
It said trapping and rehoming programs had been put on hold, making it difficult for the agency to reduce the damage horses were causing to “fragile wildlife, plants and habitats in the Victorian Alps”.
Mark Norman, the chief conservation scientist of Parks Victoria, said the court’s decision was positive.
“The Victorian alps is home to species that occur nowhere else in the world,” he said.
“They’ve evolved over millions of years and they’re not adapted to the pressures of half-tonne hard-hooved animals such as horses and deer, which cause so much damage to vegetation, waterways and other habitats. Our native wildlife and plants need help - they have nowhere else to go.”
Daniel McLaughlin, Parks Victoria’s regional director for northern Victoria, said the scale and impact of the fires had been unprecedented and governments and the community needed to “mobilise efforts” to protect what was left of important ecosystems.
He said the agency was authorised to remove feral horses from areas where conservation was a high priority and this would include “targeted ground shooting of free-ranging feral horses to control ongoing environmental damage”.
Jill Pickering, the president of the Australian Brumby Alliance, said the organisation would “continue fighting for the brumbies, their small populations Victoria’s Eastern Alps are an irreplaceable part of Australia’s cultural heritage”.
“But today’s court decision puts the future of Victoria’s brumbies in the hands of Parks Victoria,” she said.
“We may become the last generation that allowed the brumbies to be relegated into the history books.”
Andrew Cox, the chief executive of the Invasive Species Council, said the court’s decision affirmed Parks Victoria’s responsibility to manage feral horse populations.
“When implemented by professionally trained shooters, ground shooting offers a more humane approach to feral horse management for targeted groups of horses,” said Andrew Cox, the chief executive of the Invasive Species Council.
“Ground shooting can reduce the time to death and avoid undue stress on horses that may otherwise be trapped, handled and transported long distances.”
Cox said NSW was still without a long-term plan to address “the growing numbers of feral horses in Kosciuszko national park”.
“Bushfire emergency measures will begin in Kosciuszko at the end of May, but will only operate for a year, cover one part of the park and use a more limited range of control options,” he said.
The Victorian National Parks Association said feral horses had caused great damage to the alps and rejected “the notion that alpine ‘brumbies’ should be protected as a special horse breed”.
The association’s protection advocate, Phil Ingamells, said the moss beds and fens, which are high-altitude wetlands and peatlands listed as threatened under both Victorian and national environmental laws, were “especially vulnerable to trampling by horses, and any other hard hooved animals”.
“Since the abolition of cattle grazing in the Alpine national park, these wetlands have been slowly recovering, only to be impacted now by a growing number of feral horses,” he said.