photo #9281438

It's very sad that the government allows the American wild horses to be killed. She wasn't famous. She didn't even have a name. She's been gone 3 years now, a victim of the first aerial cull & I doubt anyone but the small group of us that cried for the loss of her that day even remember she ever lived. Until we found her, she'd probably never had her photo taken before. She was just a little red mare. Companion to a little red stallion, Mother to a little red foal. To some people, she was a feral nuisance. To others, she was just another brumby no different to all the others that blended instead of standing out. But to her family, she was the whole world. Had she lived would she have been trapped & chosen? Sadly, Probably not. She may have been loaded onto a rehomers trailer instead of the dog truck. But what then? How would she have been judged? Would she have been valued at $1.50 per kilo, just a touch more than the dog buyer would pay? Would someone have put some time & effort into her, added human scale value, then sold her for more? Would she have gotten adopted instead of sold & always have the safety net of being returned to sanctuary if things got rough. If she were really lucky she might have even found genuine sanctuary & just lived as a natural horse. But those spots are few & far between, they fill too fast to really give hope to the masses. If no sanctuary could be found, what would she endure just to be alive in the humans world? Would she still lose her children, her partner & every friend she ever knew? On top of losing her home & freedom? Would she be expected to be useful, earn her keep & work for whoever bought her? No matter what the 'job' was she might have been assigned? And if she couldn't do the job? What then? Sale yards? Knacker man? Would she have eventually just gotten the bullet they didn't bother to waste on her in the park? I'd like to say 'who knows' but unfortunately we do know, we've all seen it happen, if we chose to look. But very few people do look & even less say the quiet things out loud. I can honestly say i haven't lost faith in the Parks management or the rehoming program, because I never had any faith in it to begin with. It was never 'about the horses' for too many of the humans. I have, however, lost faith in humanity as a whole. Those horses were taken into the park by humans. Used as vehicles & manual labourers by humans. Rounded up & sent on a one way trip to war & death, by humans. Then discarded in the mountains to live or die on their own, by humans. Now humans have another bright idea, another use for things they do not actually own. So the horses are being slaughtered, used & traded like commodities, simply because they had the audacity to survive in the harsh situation humans abandoned them to. Not once, in all our history, have the horses ever been given a choice. Does anyone actually believe THEY WOULD CHOOSE any of this for themselves? No, I don't think they would. They have No choice They have No voice And for most now, they have no life. We don't have a horse problem. We never had a horse problem. We have a human problem. And that problem, I'm afraid, won't ever be fixed. See less