When the bogs are damaged, as they were by wild horses and the 2003 brushfires, water flows straight through, harming what McNamara calls "the liver of the Cotter catchment."
To Shoot or Trap?
Wild horses also pose a problem in another beloved Australian national park, Kosciuszko, which is managed by the New South Wales government.
While the easiest solution would be to shoot the horses, that is not an option any Australian state government is likely to adopt. A huge public outcry erupted after authorities approved aerial shooting of wild horses in the Guy Fawkes River National Park in northern New South Wales in 2000.
Rather than risk a repeat of that saga, the ACT government erected two 300-metre-long (985-foot-long) fences where horses are most likely to cross into the park.
Pests of all kinds that infest Kosciuszko, the largest park in New South Wales, occupy much of the time of Alistair Henchman. He serves as the acting director of the National Parks and Wildlife Service's southern directorate.
Henchman says the relatively small number of horses—somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500—receive more attention than the damage they cause might warrant.
"We have got a whole lot of pest animal species that we need to manage—wild dogs, pigs, rabbits—and we have got to prioritize our management," Henchman said.
"Putting aside any cultural debate about the value of horses, we simply don't think that we'd ever be able to eliminate them totally from the park. … We need to manage that population so there aren't unacceptable impacts occurring, and then we need to move on to focus on other pest species that are causing more damage," he said.
Governments are now investigating hiring contract riders to trap the unwelcome horses as a more publicly palatable way of getting them out of alpine areas. Seventy horses in Kosciuszko were caught and relocated last year around this time.
Trapping is the best method "in a social and political sense," Henchman said. "While people might criticize us for not using more dramatic methods like shooting, we're in a situation where we need to have a technique, which we can keep doing."
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